I feel like the intent of katas like these are to challenge us NOT to rely on built-ins and really think about how to replicate the behavior of the built-in method. shrug

Ahhh! Thank you for the explanation.

Just practice. You're in the right place for it. When you complete a kata and you're looking through the solutions, 'test-drive' and take apart/put back together some of the other solutions to see how they work.

facepalm of course it would be something like this. I was trying to avoid using "eval", but was overcomplicating things and finally caved. Simply brilliant

Came here to see how many others said this. Maybe it's harder in other languages? I did it in Python and passed on my first attempt.

Managed to figure something out, but this test set-up is 'not great', to put it nicely.

(Python) passed five, failed 0, and getting exit code 1 saying "TypeError: 'range' object does not support item assignment" when I'm not even using range?

I was tempted to do this, as well, but I felt that the point of this kata was to get us to think about the logic behind finding the max/min in a list, rather than just using the built-in functions.