OT: CS education gone wrong (Was: Re: TDD is BS?)

Peter Alexander peter.alexander.au at gmail.com
Sat Jun 22 11:02:29 PDT 2013


On Friday, 21 June 2013 at 21:33:43 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Also it's fair to ask about implementing a stdlib function 
> itself if the interview concerns some systems-level work; e.g. 
> brute-force strstr() is fair game and I think any engineer 
> should be able to lift it off the ground quickly (to my dismay, 
> only a fraction can). Paradoxically use of stdlib functions may 
> actually hurt; I've seen people who e.g. call strlen() in a 
> loop in order to implement strstr()!

I think it's fair game whatever kind of work you are doing. The 
tests aren't so much about the algorithm, but showing that the 
candidate thinks about edge cases, interfaces, possible failure 
cases etc.  These are things you need to think about even if your 
job is just to essentially glue libraries together. Simple tasks 
like strstr just provide a nice small task that test these things.


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