I feel like for 8 kyu and using them as practice for getting more comfortable with the basic interations of loops, dicts, tuples, lists, strings, and integers is great!

I plan use 8 kyu and up excersies in order to learn new languages. After I have gotten farther along with python I plan to start learning Rust next starting at the beginning.

There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. Thats one of the main aspects why python is such a strong programming language.

Creating algorithm is not derp it's a fun. This is just googling for some functions. :-)

I feel the same way

$codeAlphabet seems unnecessary. PHP automatically converts integers when they are concatenated to a string. Though, these are the kind of automatic behaviors that can cause such horrendous problems in a complex PHP script :/

this feels like a highly compatible solution

this is a great method, how did it work differently in python 2.x?

Though it doesn't elevate the solution, I enjoy the observation as boolean/string behavior is a big hangup when moving between languages.

The tests will return rounded numbers for the negative numbers test if you are using python 2.x

This is fixed in python 3.x but you can use

import future division

if you want to keep using 2.x

i started with a very similar solution! I then learned that "if arr:" is more pythonic because you can take advantage of the boolean nature of lists. I really like that!

what alternative method would be used?

this is an interesting and very verbose description of the sorting method. lambdas make this much simpler, though this is something I would have done prior to using lambdas