Programming in the wild...

This week we had an exercise on building trees, as lists from their nodes in a certain order, and finding the sum of the 'deepest' leaf. I found this to be the first exercise that I would describe as quite challenging. I'm not sure if it was because of my lack of knowledge about the techniques or a lack of programming intuition but I definitely struggled with the two functions mentioned above.

I can't help but wonder if this is what programming in 'the wild' will feel like. Encountering something that wasn't just designed to be worked through as an exercise or assignment, but a real world problem that might not actually have a solution until I come up with one! It's kind of scary but at the same time exciting to think of being able to tackle these types of challenges.

In the end, after I devised a solution, the functions weren't actually all that complicated looking. Although, when you're sitting at the computer just watching the cursor blink it seems like the solution might allude you for all eternity.

Without saying too much about the solutions to the problems; if your looking to build a tree from an ordered list – slice it up! If you're looking to do something to the values in a tree – keep track of them during recursion!