At Codeslingers last night, someone pulled out some coding Katas. For those who don’t know, a Kata is a coding exercise that is designed to practice your programming skills, rather than to solve a particular business problem. I was handed the classic “FizzBuzz” problem. The assignment:

Create a function that will print the integers from 1 to 100 with the following exceptions:

• If a number is divisible by 3, print the word “Fizz” in place of that number.
• If a number is divisible by 5, print the word “Buzz” in place of that number.
• If a number is divisible by both 3 and 5, print the word “FizzBuzz” in place of that number.

The output should look something like the following:

1
2
Fizz
4
Buzz
Fizz
7
8
Fizz
Buzz
11
Fizz
13
14
FizzBuzz
16

I started with a C# console application because that is the language with which I am most familiar. It was able to finish the following in under 2 minutes. It took me 5 minutes to write the unit tests.

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        for (int i = 1; i < 100; i++)
        {
            var p = FizzBuzz(i);
            Console.WriteLine(p);
        }
        Console.ReadLine();
    }

    protected static string FizzBuzz(int i)
    {
        if (i % 15 == 0)
            return "FizzBuzz";
        if (i % 3 == 0)
            return "Fizz";
        if (i % 5 == 0)
            return "Buzz";
        return i.ToString();
    }
}

I only occasionally code in JavaScript, so I tackled that language next. Someone recommended using http://jsfiddle.net/
as an online IDE for writing and sharing JavaScript, so I tried it and liked it. Of course, JavaScript is a dynamic language and one of my big challenges was spelling things correctly without all the help Visual Studio provides when writing in a statically-typed language. In my case, I misspelled the id of a div, which cost me at least 15 minutes. I created the following boilerplate HTML:

    
        
"fizzbuzz">
    

Then, I used the following JavaScript (plus a bit of jQuery) to output the FizzBuzz results:

for (i = 1; i <= 100; i++) {
    $("#fizzbuzz").append(function() {
        var newLine = i;
        if (i % 3 === 0) {
            newLine = "Fizz";
        }
        if (i % 5 === 0) {
            newLine = "Buzz";
        }
        if (i % 15 === 0) {
            newLine = "FizzBuzz";
        }
        var newDiv = $("
").text(newLine);
        return newDiv;
    });
}

A simple program like this provides a fun way to practice an old language and to learn a new language. Next up, I’ll try this program with F# and Ruby, since I have very little experience with these languages.