[smnscu]

Ah, the perennial apologetics of weaponized mediocrity. If you can't write a simple recursive algorithm that swaps two values (Max Howell), two nested for loops (DHH), or show me that you used Python at least once (uhh length? yes, there is this builtin, I forgot its name...), why would I want to hire you over someone who has seen a computer before?

And to avoid being called hypocritical, here's off the top of my head how the answers would look like (I don't use Python very often either):

1. len(thingie)

2.

  def bubsort(arr):
    if not arr: return None
    for i in range(len(arr)):
      for j in range(i+1, len(arr)):
        if arr[i] > arr[j]: arr[i], arr[j] = arr[j], arr[i]
    return arr

3.

  def revtree(node):
    if not node: return None
    node.left, node.right = revtree(node.right), revtree(node.left)
    return node

edit: works well for something coded on the toilet: https://gist.github.com/andreis/69a242330617b2a62753ce604e27...

[Mutinix]

> why would I want to hire you over someone who has seen a computer before?

Because, you know, they invented Ruby on Rails and Homebrew? Incredible, really. You were so adamant on being hostile that you managed to put yourself over Max Howell and DHH in a couple of sentences. These people have made valuable contributions to the tech industry as it stands today. This is a fact and not an opinion. They invented Homebrew and Ruby on Rails.

Good job, you solved the problems and are more likely to be hired by Google than Max Howell. Except he created the most popular package manager in OSX history and companies still can't see that.

[dozzie]

> Except he created the most popular package manager in OSX history and companies still can't see that.

First, Homebrew is just a rehash of package managers that were available on unices for more than a decade. Then, from what I hear, Homebrew was (still is?) badly designed and implemented for quite a long time, which is not an evidence of author's high skills (as a programmer, anyway).

[Helmet]

This is so ridiculous that I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. If not, you are the very definition of why n-gate.com exists.

[dozzie]

Which part is ridiculous? The fact that Dpkg, RPM, their peers, and infrastructure on top of all that (APT, up2date, Yum, BSD ports, Gentoo Portage, and so on) existed for a long time before Homebrew, the fact that people were constantly complaining about Homebrew breaking their installed packages on update, the fact that it used to require /usr/local to be user-owned, or the fact that it wasn't using (still isn't? I haven't checked) cryptographic signatures for downloading software to install?

[cakedoggie]

Not everybody can say that though.

[fencepost]

For the simple option of length, depending on what you've been working in you might be thinking of len, length, .length, strlen, sizeof, and undoubtedly many other variations of the same thing. Things that may come seamlessly and automatically when you're in the flow of actually coding in language X may be very difficult to choose between while standing at a whiteboard in a conference room

[ubernostrum]

Ah, the perennial apologetics of weaponized mediocrity.

Don't look now, but you just failed every interview I've ever conducted. Maybe consider a field where the skill you've just demonstrated would be useful -- politics, perhaps?

[jstarks]

That's not bubble sort.