Can you solve these problems in your language of choice then? How can you write business logic at work without loops?

I tried looking up various solutions in languages which I knew a lot better, so, and example of one of these would be Go.

The logic was there, but I still couldn't understand most of what was going on, unfortunately.

Through trial and error, I eventually managed to get something working.

>How can you write business logic at work without loops? It's not that I don't use them, it's that I have a hard time figuring out how to use them in the context of solving the problem.

Personally, I would feel trying to find the solution by parsing other people's code would be way more complicated than just coming up with your own solution.

I would forget about C, though, and try to do it in a language you already know to begin with.

To be honest I also find it very difficult to relate, as especially the Cesar Chiffre seems like such an easy problem. I only have to read it and my brain already maps out the solution. (I guess you could call it a No-Brainer, except that it seems to be a "Brainer" :-)

I honestly can not imagine how you usually code.

However, I want to say I remember my first year of studying mathematics. Many of the exercises also seemed very hard back then, but looking back on them the following year, they actually seemed quite easy (well, most of them). So practice and experience really can work. No guarantees, though.

Personally I like "Project Euler" for programming problems: https://projecteuler.net/ I actually had questions pop up in interviews that I had previously solved on project Euler.

I would be very interested to hear about some examples of real-world contexts that have proven tricky. As much detail as possible is preferable.

Incidentally I describe my problems with math almost the exact same way - virtually nonexistent fundamental understanding, and so huge issues with abstracting out even the simplest real-world tasks. (My wake-up call was when I was basically just mashing buttons on my calculator one day when I realized I didn't know how to compute how much of X I could buy given that it was $Y per weight.)

Have you tried writing it out on paper as a flowchart? Sounds old school, but can help with visualising what's happening.

Loops become super simple when you see them as series of steps with a yes/no question of whether to stop or go through your steps again.

Draw up some boxes for every variable you think you're going to need, give them labels and add the labels to the flowchart.

This then allows you to run through the flowchart step by step changing the values in each box as you go.

> Figuring out loops

Maybe you're making it too complicated. The reason for loops is simply that you need to repeat an operation. Call it repetition if that helps.

- for x;y;z - repeat a specific number of times, or need an index #

- for x in y - iterate over container

- while x - repeat while a condition is true

- do while x - like while, but run at least once.

So, imagine we have a string and need to add 1 to each character. The second bullet above looks best, first if the language is lower level.

From this description it seems you have problems with implementation.

You probably lack in "coding"(maping solution to code) department - it's totally normal in language you don't work in day to day. You are probably less skilled in implementing simple, lower level abstractions - understandable given your background.

I have more exp than you - recently I was helping friend with python ML code - it took me 40 mins to code 20 lines. I don't feel bad at all, because even though I knew solution, to write it in python I had to google for each line and read docs to know range handling, dsl of libs, array comprehension syntax, lambdas etc.

Good news is that it's easy to get proficient fast by doing such exercises. I can recommend codewars.com