Add cars-assemble concept exercise

[pablo-miralles]

Summary

• Adds the cars-assemble concept exercise, ported from csharp/cars-assemble.
• Teaches comparison-operators and if-control-structures after booleans and the number concepts from pizza-pi.
• Fills a critical syllabus gap: after booleans, students currently had no concept exercise for conditionals.

Test plan

• bin/configlet generate / fmt / lint
• PHPUNIT_BIN=phpunit bin/test.sh cars-assemble (18 tests passing)
• Track maintainer review of narrative tone / unlock order

Made with Cursor

[mk-mxp]

Thanks a lot for your work! New to the PHP track and head first into concept exercise writing. Do you have experience with Exercism approach to concepts, concept exercises and the didact concept behind all this code and files?

I tried to get my head around this PR, but I run out of time for today. I hope to find time for the review this weekend.

[pablo-miralles]

@mk-mxp Thanks! Take your time with the review, no rush.

I’m used to seeing PHP and how it works, because I work with it daily in WordPress. Writing it from scratch has always been harder for me. I’ve been more of an “understand, copy and paste” person. That’s why I’m going through this track myself. Along the way, I thought it could be a good idea to help improve it while I review and reinforce concepts.

What’s new for me is Exercism’s approach to concepts, concept exercises, and the docs/meta structure around them.

How I built this PR: I used the C# cars-assemble as a close reference (especially the story/instructions), rewrote the PHP docs, and used another existing PHP track exercise as a reference for PHPUnit syntax, since I hadn’t written those tests by hand before.

The idea was almost a 1:1 port from the C# track, but I think it may feel too complex for the actual level of the PHP track. For example, the exemplar uses self::, which isn’t taught yet on the PHP track.

Would you rather I keep working on this PR and simplify it, or close it for now so I can open a small issue first and rewrite the exercise in a simpler way?

My intention is to help improve the PHP track while learning a bit myself. I don’t want to create noise or extra work for you, so I’ll follow your suggestion.

Thanks again!

[pablo-miralles]

What’s new for me is Exercism’s approach to concepts, concept exercises, and the docs/meta structure around them.

Just to clarify one point from my previous comment: what’s new for me is not the syllabus idea itself. I get that Exercism teaches roughly one concept at a time, like a skill tree that unlocks as you go. What’s newer for me is the practical side of writing the docs/meta files around a concept exercise.

As I said, this was almost a 1:1 port from C#. I could clean it up a bit so the idea stays the same, but making the code a little more beginner-friendly. The class constant / self:: in the exemplar is the part that bothers me most.

Happy to wait for your comments and suggestions. I’m here to try and help if I can, not to make things harder. Please feel completely free to tell me if it makes sense for me to keep contributing, or if right now it would be more of a burden than a help. I’d rather ask than get in the way.

[mk-mxp]

@resu-xuniL This might be interesting for you, too!

Let's start with common details: There is a lot of documentation what the files are and what they must / should contain. We have a tool configlet, that helps with many things around track maintenance. And there is much more to read, about test runner Docker images and so on. Don't read all of it now, I'll point you to the docs when necessary.

Concepts and concept exercises are much more track specific than practice exercises. So while there is a problem specification repo for practice exercises, concept exercises must be hand picked and adjusted to the track heavily. You picked one from C# that has a good fit for PHP. You may also look at JavaScript or Python, which also have great exercises we may use.

Our list of concepts is much bigger than the list of concept exercises. Ideally each concept is accompanied by one concept exercise, tailored to make students use and understand this concept. The design.md of the exercise should clearly state, what is taught. But there also may be multiple concepts / concept exercises around a single topic - e.g. variable-length arguments are an addition to user-defined functions - it depends on what we think is suitable for a learning unit.

The other way around (one exercise shared by multiple concepts) has shown to be un-helpful. Students get irritated by getting told, that they have learned a concept they didn't even look at. We want to avoid that, but especially for the first few exercises this is really hard to do. So Exercism says, we should do "hand-waving" instead - use languge constructs not yet introduced, but not explain them in detail. We think hard to avoid this - idiomatic, production-like code is not the goal. First of all it needs to be understandable for people without PHP knowledge.

In addition, the concepts have 2 parts on them. One part is introduction.md, referred to by %{concept:<concept-slug>} in the exercises. This shall be a concise, short explanation of the concept to get people started for the exercise. Expect people to be a bit of a programmer, but not familiar with PHP and especially this concept. What must we tell them, to solve the exercise? The other concept document, about.md, often looks identical, but should have more general information about the concept. E.g. for variable-length-arguments, we show people how to use them in introduction.md and how to combine them with other arguments in about.md.

We also have a hints.md for more details, documentation links and general help about the problem - but we should not give away the solution directly. But we must remember, in these exercises people cannot see the test code. So we may need to be more helpful than in practice exercises, where people shall look more freely for solutions.

Weaving the exercise into the sylabus tree: Avoid too many prerequisites (1-2, 3 at max). Assume all dependencies of the chosen prerequisites to be fulfilled, don't repeat them. Ask first, what logic prerequisites a concept has, then think about how the concept exercise constrained to these prerequisites should look like.

In this example, as you already pointed out, the class constant is a construct we shouldn't use. Also look at the exemplar.php: it is not using any complicated if/elseif/else things - we should keep if-control-structures for another exercise dealing with more complicated decisions. So focus the exercise on numerical comparisons - PHP has more complex comparison operations to expand on in a later concept on top of this. Maybe add a <= suggesting task. Maybe introduce <=> for a task. And a not equal task.

I'm out of time again, I'll come back to this tomorrow.

[mk-mxp]

@pablo-miralles @resu-xuniL I'll go more specifically into this concept / concept exercise now. @pablo-miralles Please keep working on this PR and modify it. I think it is a good fit and not too far away from being merged 😄

As said before, sharpening the focus could help with more intensely teaching comparison-operators. It's also allowed to change the concept's introduction.md to narrow it down to the actual required comparisons. Only about.md should keep the whole picture, so students can refer back to the concept page later on.

If possible, try to stay away from type casting / type conversions, too. intval() or (int) are introduced in type juggling very late in the current syllabus. Choose test cases without the need for type conversions. As we do not use typed parameters, it is very easy in PHP to simply not mention types but still use implicit type conversions (e.g. for multiplying the float result of successRate() with 221). Or do some magic on the hidden test side (e.g. use assertEqualsWithDelta() to avoid assertion errors on floats).

When giving code examples, in concept or exercise documents, we have to use PHP specific syntax. This a bit of a challenge for polyglot programmers, but it hits students hard when they copy code into their exercise and it doesn't work. Please look through the documents and fix places like CarsAssemble.successRate() to be valid if the student copies that into their code ($this->successRate() in this case).

Looking forward to the next iteration, you are welcome to help!

[mk-mxp]

@pablo-miralles To avoid that I read code you still work on, please drop me a note when you are done with the iteration.

[pablo-miralles]

@mk-mxp Thanks again for taking the time to explain how Exercism concepts and concept exercises work. That context helped a lot, especially as this is my first contribution here :)

Also, sorry about the accidental update on this PR earlier. I pushed a revision by mistake while still iterating locally, then force-pushed back to the previous commit so the PR would show the original version again. I know that still leaves a noisy history, and I’m sorry for the extra noise.

I’ve now revised the exercise locally following your guidance (narrower focus on comparison-operators, simpler exemplar, no casting / self::, updated concept docs, and PHP-valid examples). I’ve pushed that next iteration shortly for review.

Thanks again for the clear feedback and for welcoming the help!