pre-heating the brain oven
Snow Bear II, North York, Toronto, ON
Today’s crowning achievement was either helping with the driveway shoveling, or helping craft this snow bear. Wooh!
Wonderful as a snow bear is, tonight I finally returned to study this Stack Overflow post in order to code a better solution to this Project Euler problem. My current solution gleefully attempts to create a 600,851,475,142-long list in memory. Wooh!
def max_prime_factor(num)
# returns the largest prime factor of num
# does not work for Bignums ;_;
(2..num).select{ |n| (num % n == 0) && (2...n).none?{ |i| n % i ==0} }.max
end
It struck me that for a moment, I was struggling to understand what Ruby’s Prime.prime_division does. My fingers also felt hesitant with typing the commands to Terminal and I felt really guilty with having to double-check how to declare a lambda. (I was getting tired of typing num.prime_division and figured I’d get around it with a lambda; also, lately I’ve been eager to use lambdas whenever possible.)
I realized that my brain had gotten rather limp and soft over the past week-plus of barely coding anything. After lamenting about my guilt to J, he matter-of-factly suggested that I “bake [my brain] in the oven” to harden it again.
OK… Well, this does crystallize the fact that passively reading about programming is no match for actually doing it. I feel horrifyingly impotent tonight!