Tuesday 30 July 2013

Playing with CoffeeScript

I've recently been playing around with CoffeeScript lately, and as I have a tendency to do I decided to crack open a prime number challenge and see what the solution looked like.

The Challenge

I recently set this up as a challenge at work as a bit of fun which goes as follows.

"Calculate the first 10,000 prime numbers, output the largest prime number and the sum of all palindromic primes"

I've implemented the solution a number of times using C#, C++, Python, Go and JavaScript and it is the latter that I wanted to compare the solution to.  The JavaScript solution I created typically ran in about 15ms after a fair amount of tweaking and profiling to squeeze as much out of it as I could do (within my own abilities).

In all I found writing the solution a pleasant experience, with a very simple and expressive syntax which abstracts away some of the ugliness that is JavaScript (not that I particularly dislike JavaScript, it's quite fun actually).  List comprehensions were incredibly useful and powerful as they are in other languages and writing iterations and checks were very simple.

Anyway, here's my solution.  I'm sure it's not perfect, and there are probably some CoffeeScript tricks that I've not picked up yet.  But the solution is as fast as my JavaScript implementation and much easier to read, so all positives in my book :)

My JavaScript solution along with a couple of others is available on the gist as well.



EDIT: Since posting this I tweaked the solution a little bit after noticing that I was evaluating all of the values in the array of candidates, instead of working only up to the square root of the upper value

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