Anagram exercise placement about rust HOT 5 CLOSED

If you're interested, I finally got around to finishing the exercise today. I know a lot more about Rust now but that was brutal! My solution

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I don't have experience with Rust, but I did want to say that we've seen this in other language tracks, and have later moved exercises that we found to be simpler into earlier positions in the track.

I would be very interested in seeing individual exercises to address the concepts that you mention if none of the existing ones are focused enough. They probably aren't to be honest, since we just kind of make up random puzzles and problems to solve and hope that they have interesting concepts in them. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they do in some languages but not others.

I think we might have several exercises that are simpler than Anagram.

Some possible candidates (you can say exercism fetch rust $EXERCISE if you want to fetch individual exercises)

• word-count
• hamming
• nucleotide-count
• raindrops
• etl
• scrabble-score

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If I understand the UI correctly (and correct me if I'm wrong, @kytrinyx ) about 410 people have done Leap, while 277 have done Anagram. That's about 1/3 of our students not making progress.

Other tracks do have completion rate decline between exercises, which is expected. But having also dealt with the Lifetimes Hurdle, I agree that it can be hard. And I think the numbers show that.

So, I'm agreed that Anagram comes too early. I think there are other, gentler Rust exercises we could put before it. Such as (roughly in order)

• Difference of Squares (can introduce fold, depending on implementation)
• Hamming (Result)
• Word Count (HashMaps, filter)
• Nucleotide Count

I think there's still an issue (and a long standing one at that) of setting up some problems specifically to introduce Lifetimes. I'm kind-of in the middle of writing a Rust workshop, and I'm hoping some lifetimes exercises will result from that. To Be Determined, I guess.

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I'm going to close this because I want to tackle problem ordering all at once (or at least take a good run at it) in #127.

Thanks so much for the fantastic write up @mlk5060. Even though it took me 4 (yes, 1, 2, 3, 4) blog posts to describe how I handled this exercise I never thought, "Huh, maybe we could just move that exercise to later". Because I am super dumb.

So, ✋ high five to you for taking the time to write that up here and help a bunch of future Rust students on Exercism.

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about 410 people have done Leap, while 277 have done Anagram.

This doesn't include archived solutions, but the ratio is about right.

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