Sometimes Julia feels like cheating
I just tried my first problem on Codewars and realised: This solution feels like cheating
https://www.codewars.com/kata/582aafca2d44a4a4560000e7Open linkView original on lemmy.worldhttps://www.codewars.com/kata/582aafca2d44a4a4560000e7Open linkView original on lemmy.world
What's the solution in Julia?
I first did something with
findfirst, which needed some bounds checks. Then I saw another answer and they usedsearchsortedfirstwhich is just it ... Even the documentation reads like the problem descriptionAh so the library is just made for problems like this. Who would have thought :)
Naahh… searchsortedfirst is simply faster than other search algorithms (in this specific case). Extremely useful in many applications.It ist there because Julia cares about efficiency
This helped me realize how much this aligns with my problems (and I guess the spirit of this test problem). Sometimes you have special knowledge of your data and can use much more efficient functions that are just there in Julia.