Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
Maybe my first program in Pascal, my first programming course.The school had never taught programming before (yeah, I'm that old), and it was a business teacher who didn't know how to program or use a Mac, and the incomplete syllabus was for a class from another school that used a Honeywell and punch cards.The first Pascal program was to write a calculator that allowed a user to input arithmetic problems in words and get the correct answer.>five plus seventeen22>two hundred fifty six divided by three85 r 1The professor hadn't taught us strings and the textbook Pascal was different from the Mac.However, the school required me to maintain minimum credits to stay in a welding program I needed for a raise at work, so that by the time I realized how bad the class was, it was too late to drop.I welded all day at school, programmed for 1-2 hours, went to class, then worked on the program all night at libraries at the UW. One of the UW students complained to a librarian about my smell from the welding; he knew I was junior college scum.It seems ridiculous today, but it took me a week to pull it together. I sometimes cried from the frustration. I wrote everything out longhand on yellow legal pads at the UW libraries, welded 8 hours, then computer lab, and class, bus back to the UW. I was struggling in my arc welding class, too. I couldn't get the feel of striking an arc, and the men helped each other, but initially refused to help the only woman in the class.My first solution was clumsy, but I got all the components to run, figured out reading strings, input/output, handling spelling errors. The text had a rigorous theoretical description of top down programming, and after I got  the syntax and op system nailed, I used that to write an elegant and robust algorithm. I didn't realize until years later what I was doing, writing an algorithm.Then late one night, library almost closing, I had it! Next day I entered the hand written program into a Mac at school, and it ran perfectly.It was the solving, not the problem that was hard, and I bet most here can't imagine all the missing components I had to find for myself, but the lack of tools, prior knowledge, and information made solving it almost impossible. Today, I could Google all the help I needed for a zero-to-program in two hours, but I'd never feel the level of victory as I did that afternoon when all my classmates entered arithmetic problems into my calculator and got answers.