Tag practice exercises with practices and prerequisites

[pablo-miralles]

Summary

• Fills practices and prerequisites for all 108 active practice exercises in config.json (deprecated ones stay empty).
• No new exercises — only tagging.
• Follows configlet constraints:
  • each concept appears in practices at most 10 times
  • prerequisites only use concepts already taught by a concept exercise
  • hello-world keeps empty prerequisites

Approach

• practices: one primary concept per exercise, distributed so common skills (strings, arrays, loops, class-basics, …) stay ≤10.
• prerequisites: unlock using currently taught concepts (basic-syntax, strings, integers, arrays, class-basics, …).
• Untaught concepts (e.g. foreach-loops, match-expression) can still appear in practices; they will unlock more naturally once their concept exercises land.

Gaps after tagging (0 practice links)

These concepts still have no practice exercise tagged (need future exercises and/or concept exercises first):
class-visibility, constructor-promotion, covariance-and-contravariance, readonly-properties, scope-resolution-operator, type-juggling, union-types, variable-functions, variable-length-arguments, variable-scope

Note: type-juggling and variable-length-arguments are taught by concept exercises, but were not used as primary practices tags to stay under the per-concept cap / avoid stretch mappings.

Test plan

• Custom validation: all active tagged, max-10 respected, prereqs ⊆ taught concepts
• bin/configlet lint
• Maintainer review of stretch tags (e.g. break-continue-keywords on killer-sudoku-helper, match-expression on say / yacht / robot-simulator)

Made with Cursor

[mk-mxp]

@pablo-miralles Thank you for wanting to help! I'm sorry, this is actually wasted effort here: The issue #324 you worked on is labelled "paused" for a reason. Prerequisites hide exercises from students, until they have solved a concept exercise. We decided to wait with this, until we have enough exercises:

It should be at least 20 concept exercises to plan out the prerequisites.

Please come up with a plan for discussion first, especially for this task. A pull request made with assumptions you have never discussed is like to cause a lot of frustration on both of our sides.

Thanks again for offering your help!

[pablo-miralles]

@mk-mxp Thank you for the clear explanation, and sorry for the wasted review time :')

This was my first PR ever. I noticed that other tracks in the website lock many practice exercises and unlock them as you learn concepts, so seeing PHP without that surprised me and I jumped straight into this PR. I didn’t notice that #324 was already open. My bad!

Just to make sure I understand the workflow going forward: I should start from the issues (find a related one, or open a new issue referencing existing discussion), get agreement on a plan there, and only then open a PR. Is that correct?

I’d like to help with concept exercises next, until we have enough to start tagging. I already opened #1035. Should I check #578, ask which exercises are needed there, and only then work on a PR linked to that issue?

Thanks again for your time, really appreciated!

[mk-mxp]

The workflow usually is relaxed, but syllabus and concepts need a lot of discussion. So I prefer opening an issue with the suggestions, have the discussions there and then go on to implement what's agreed on with a PR.

For a general discussion on the tracks concept exercises we can use #578. The former maintainer suggested drawing a mermaid graph (integrated in GitHub markdown) with suggestions like this of the Odin track - I think that would be a good starting point. Then we should first solve the "multiple concepts with one exercise" problem we have by adding more low level concept exercises. Then we urgently need basic conditionals (if-control-structures) and the plain functions (user-defined-functions) we use a lot.