The prime numbers

We have 226 questions about prime numbers at the time of writing. Almost every single one of these involves some adaptation of the “canonical prime checking code” or the “canonical prime generator”. Primes are notorious for not really conforming to any mathematical symmetry in a lot of ways, so very often, there is no way around a “brute force” approach: you just do exactly what the challenge tells you to do with your bit of primality logic; and that bit of logic is usually the “ungolfable” part.

I beg you — I plead you — consider any other integer sequence for once. Spice things up! Whatever challenge you were going to write called “Onerous primes” or “Highfalutin primes” or “Supercalifragilistic primes”: ask it about the odious numbers or the lucky numbers or the Ulam numbers instead. Or heck, ask it about the squares!

There isn’t anything wrong with the prime numbers, but there isn’t anything particularly nice about them either. In fact, primality is quite an “ugly” condition, in the sense that there’s no “nice” way to get the next prime, or the number of primes below n, etc. This is what makes them interesting to study from a mathematical point of view, but they’re a nuisance to compute things about, because you can’t apply very many “tricks”, and this might actually limit the set of approaches golfers could reasonably take to solve your challenge with.

Please, give this some thought before you post the 227th, or 228th, or 229th question asking us to find “the n-th prime number such that (blah blah blah).” If I have to write any(n%i for i in range(2,n)) one more time I’m going to explode.

The prime numbers

We have 226 questions about prime numbers at the time of writing. Almost every single one of these involves some adaptation of the “canonical prime checking code” or the “canonical prime generator”. Primes are notorious for not really conforming to any mathematical symmetry in a lot of ways, so very often, there is no way around a “brute force” approach: you just do exactly what the challenge tells you to do with your bit of primality logic; and that bit of logic is usually the “ungolfable” part.

I beg you — I plead you — consider any other integer sequence for once. Spice things up! Whatever challenge you were going to write called “Onerous primes” or “Highfalutin primes” or “Supercalifragilistic primes”: ask it about the odious numbers or the lucky numbers or the Ulam numbers instead. Or heck, ask it about the squares!

There isn’t anything wrong with the prime numbers, but there isn’t anything particularly nice about them either. In fact, primality is quite an “ugly” condition, in the sense that there are no formulas for the next prime after \$p\$, or the number of primes below \$n\$, etc. This is what makes them interesting to study from a mathematical point of view, but they’re a nuisance to compute things about, because you can’t apply very many tricks, and this might actually limit the set of approaches golfers could reasonably take to solve your challenge with.

Please, give this some thought before you post the 227th, or 228th, or 229th question asking us to find “the n-th prime number such that (blah blah blah).”

The prime numbers

We have 226 questions about prime numbers at the time of writing. Almost every single one of these involves some adaptation of the “canonical prime checking code” or the “canonical prime generator”. Primes are notorious for not really conforming to any mathematical symmetry in a lot of ways, so very often, there is no way around a “brute force” approach: you just do exactly what the challenge tells you to do with your bit of primality logic; and that bit of logic is usually the “ungolfable” part.

I beg you — I plead you — consider any other integer sequence for once. Spice things up! Whatever challenge you were going to write called “Onerous primes” or “Highfalutin primes” or “Supercalifragilistic primes”: ask it about the odious numbers or the lucky numbers or the Ulam numbers instead. Or heck, ask it about the squares!

Please, give this some thought before you post the 227th, or 228th, or 229th question asking us to find “the n-th prime number such that (blah blah blah).” If I have to write any(n%i for i in range(2,n)) one more time I’m going to explode.

The prime numbers

We have 226 questions about prime numbers at the time of writing. Almost every single one of these involves some adaptation of the “canonical prime checking code” or the “canonical prime generator”. Primes are notorious for not really conforming to any mathematical symmetry in a lot of ways, so very often, there is no way around a “brute force” approach: you just do exactly what the challenge tells you to do with your bit of primality logic; and that bit of logic is usually the “ungolfable” part.

I beg you — I plead you — consider any other integer sequence for once. Spice things up! Whatever challenge you were going to write called “Onerous primes” or “Highfalutin primes” or “Supercalifragilistic primes”: ask it about the odious numbers or the lucky numbers or the Ulam numbers instead. Or heck, ask it about the squares!

There isn’t anything wrong with the prime numbers, but there isn’t anything particularly nice about them either. In fact, primality is quite an “ugly” condition, in the sense that there’s no “nice” way to get the next prime, or the number of primes below n, etc. This is what makes them interesting to study from a mathematical point of view, but they’re a nuisance to compute things about, because you can’t apply very many “tricks”, and this might actually limit the set of approaches golfers could reasonably take to solve your challenge with.

Please, give this some thought before you post the 227th, or 228th, or 229th question asking us to find “the n-th prime number such that (blah blah blah).” If I have to write any(n%i for i in range(2,n)) one more time I’m going to explode.