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0 pointstluyben213y ago0 comments

So you find the (far more real world) code of Inufu unreadable?

Edit: actually when interviewing people I show them some Haskell code and ask what it does. Most of them do, some answer that they don't know the programming language. Of course I don't give them very difficult stuff, but still; a lot of well written Haskell code is incredible readable, even for people who never saw it. Also, I really assume if you have a CS degree that you played around with functional languages and recursion. My disappointment with a certain country was that almost none (and I interviewed 100s in the past 10 years) of the Masters of CS from that country even have a clue what recursion is, let alone functional or logic programming languages.

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Woost13y ago· 1 in thread

Would something like the above code be on your interview? (pow = 1 : [ 2*x | x <- pow])

I'd probably fail it even though I do understand recursion. I don't know Haskell, and the above is rather cryptic to me. I can infer that it raises 2 to a power, but I'm not sure how it works -- both in how it's called (does that define a function? Pow(4) --> 16?) and the why (the last part defines the recursion I assume, but what happens when you need multiple args, and what does it mean?)

tluyben2OP13y ago

If the interviewer is not giving the opportunity that the code is just plain wrong and assures it's correct (which I say upfront) then people can be 'wrong' saying it takes an argument x and get the 2^ or it prints the number of 2^argument or that it will just infinitely loop. All of these are fine with me; you read the code and at least got the gist. It's not brilliant because the list comprehension looks like most list comprehensions in other languages so then you can know pow makes a list which elements are (ordered) 2^[1..n] numbers.

Edit: But to answer your question: yes, I would like to be asked. I did a lot of interviews from the employee side just because I was curious, and, at least in the Netherlands, they never gave me a test. Just looked at my (possibly fake if I wanted) credentials and said yes/no. No tests, at all.