jcmorrow @jcmorrow@merveilles.town

However, short of making a custom stencil for each cell, I have absolutely no clue how to do part 2 in J, so that will have to wait!

I'm pretty proud of my J solution to part one of today's advent of code.

https://gist.github.com/jcmorrow/b042608a5bb1d6012029d0011793140e

It's probably not as terse as a seasoned J programmer might go, but the way that tile, is, pad, unpad and count all work together is really nice IMHO.

But I'm still not sure how to apply dyadic verbs to arrays 🤔

not so bad after some cleanup: https://gist.github.com/jcmorrow/d95113066f69ffb1a69de4b63f03e900

Well, this problem wasn't bad, and it was my second day in a row of solving the problem in J in less than an hour, but it feels like I'm not quite doing things the proper J-way 😞

AoC Day 9 let's go!!!

it was a good one! I have gotten *much* better at J in the past week. Although I did use `if`s a bit more than I would have liked.

hahaha, I can count. I meant Day 8 😃

AoC Day 7 here we go!

But I learned about and used the prefix adverb today, and it is 🔥 https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/bslashdot

Ah gosh, day 6 of AoC done. I kind of know how to do basic stuff in J now, but I have a *really* hard time getting the ranks of my parsed input and the verbs to agree. I'm guessing that will become more instinctual with time, but gosh it sucks right now.

J code is hillarious. Solution for day 4 part 1 (I don't think this is a spoiler because I wrote it and even I can't read it):
```
load 'regex'
input =: fread '~/code/advent_of_code/day_4.txt'
passports =: ('\n\n'&rxmatches rxcut ]) input
requiredFields =: ;:'byr iyr eyr hgt hcl ecl pid'
allMatches =: dyad : '(|: 0 _1 + |: ({."2 x rxmatches y)) rxfrom y'
+/ 7 = >+/ L:0 requiredFields e. L:1 '\w+:' allMatches L:0 passports
```

I still haven't finished AOC day two : (

But I *did* find the solutions to 2016 in J and boy... they sure do look like an alien rolled their face on a very awkward keyboard:
https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Advent_Of_Code_2016#alternate_solution

Well I eventually got through day one by doing everything with matrix operations. But I just opened day two and... it's not just a list of numbers so I guess I have to learn about how J handles strings 😂

I'm trying to do AOC in J and it's already so hard. How does anyone program without LOOPS?