Advent Of Code and Alteryx

It is now just over 5 years since I tweeted the below on X (Twitter):

and, pulling that tweet up to write this post, I realise I actually got very little engagement. But fast forward 5 years and at the time of writing (Day 9) over 100 people have solved at least one of this year's problems using Alteryx; there is a very active WhatsApp group (that I struggle to keep up to date with!) and you can get a shiny Advent Of Code badge on the Alteryx community!

What is the Advent Of Code?

But what is this Advent Of Code (AoC)? And why do we care that people are solving it in Alteryx?

Advent Of Code was created by Eric Wastl in 2015[3] and is "an annual set of Christmas-themed computer programming challenges that follow an Advent calendar."[4] So not particularly data problems or designed to be solved by Alteryx, people solve them in all sorts of computer languages. Over the years I have solved them in many languages including Python, R, Scala and Rust. For myself as a software engineer I find it an interesting way of playing with a new language, learning its capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. And also as a way of seeing how other people write code.

So why solve them in Alteryx? Well the simplest answer is why not? Doing strange things with Alteryx has been something I have enjoyed doing for many years.

The second answer is because I can :) (Sometimes...) What I noticed back in 2018, and has held true since, is that Alteryx is very good at solving the early days of the AoC challenges. And this is in many ways due to how Eric designed the puzzles: the input to every problem is always a single text file and the answer (or output) is always a single integer. (Well two integers, as each day has two parts.) So however complex the puzzle, all of the input is always contained in a single text file, that has to be parsed into its parts, before you move on to solving the actual puzzle. And if there is one thing that Alteryx can do very well, it is parsing text files!

Where things become interesting is as the problems get more complex, we begin to run into the limits of Alteryx as a programming language. Which leads me to my next interesting question:

Is Alteryx A Programming Language?

This is an interesting question. It is certainly not marketed as a programming language. Typically we think of a programming language being made up of code and Alteryx is talked about as being "code free".

But in reality: yes, Alteryx is a programming language.

As the user drags and drops tools on to the canvas they are building up an xml document that represents the data transformation that they have defined. That xml (or code) is then executed by the Alteryx engine.

If we are going to be more specific we can say that Alteryx is a "Visual Programming Language" and it is a "Domain Specific Language". The domain in question being data analytics. And it is this domain which brings certain limits to the language which makes some of the Advent Of Code problems more challenging...

But Isn't Alteryx Turing Complete?

Well yes. I think it was Steve Ahlgren who famously stated that Alteryx was Turing complete if you used a rock to hold down the run button. But being Turing complete isn't actually that interesting for real world applications. My 10 year old daughter with a pen and a pad of paper is Turing complete. As is Excel [5]. As is "Magic: the Gathering" [6]. But none of those are going to be particularly good for writing arbitrary computer programs in. Turing completeness is a useful concept when we are looking at the theory of what computer algorithms can or can not do. It is not a great measure for what they can practically do with a reasonable amount of computing power and time.

Where are the limits of the Alteryx language?

I think there are two major limitations that you run into in trying to solve Advent Of Code problems in Alteryx: Types and Loops.

(Please add in the comments if you can think of more.)

Types

The only data type in the top level Alteryx language is the data table. This makes a lot of sense given our previous statement that is a Domain Specific Language for manipulating data, but does limit its capabilities when trying to use it as a more general purpose language. Of course within the data table there is a rich type system and usually you can work within the table to represent the data variables you need.

Loops

I think this is the big one, and usually the point where I give up on AoC in Alteryx for the year. Alteryx does have the concept of loops in the form of batch macros (loosely equivalent to a FOR loop) and iterative macros (loosely equivalent to a DO WHILE loop), but these can be difficult to configure (especially if you have some complex data variables you are manipulating in tables. But more of a problem on the practicality front they can take a long time to execute. I have built AoC solutions that have taken over 24 hours to execute. Generate rows can be a good way to avoid a macro solution and simulate a loop, but can sometimes bring different data size issues.

Conclusion

Day 9 is usually about as far as I get with Advent Of Code and Alteryx, before the busy-ness of family life and December overtakes life. (And having departed Alteryx last week, my trial Alteryx license will soon run out). So next year I will be completing AoC in a different language.

Good luck to everyone still playing!

Merry Christmas

Adam

References:

• [1] Image Creator from Microsoft Designer (bing.com)

• [2] Advent of Code 2023 (2023). https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alter-Nation/Advent-of-Code-2023/ba-p/1211440.

• [3] Advent of Code 2023 (2023). https://adventofcode.com/.

• [4] Wikipedia contributors (2023) Advent of Code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent_of_Code.

• [5] Couriol, B. (2021) 'The Excel Formula language is now Turing-Complete,' InfoQ, 2 August. https://www.infoq.com/articles/excel-lambda-turing-complete/.

• [6] Churchill, A. (2019) Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete. https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828.