Re:Show HN: 15-question programming quiz with answers
by ammon on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @01:36PM
(#14403235)
Well, the questions get into other things too.(Character encoding, timing attacks, graph algorithms.) Writing a good single-paragraph description of iterative deepening depth-first search was a challenge!
Re:Show HN: 15-question programming quiz with answers
by acconrad on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @01:56PM
(#14403484)
Yeah except that character encoding question assumes I know how Python handles bytearrays. That trick answer of "it will break" threw me for a loop because I needed language-specific knowledge about the types that Python could handle for that input.
And then with timing attacks - I mean SQL Injection is a fair web security question to ask someone, but the timing is like, very fringe knowledge. Most devs let their framework handle all of those kinds of things. Not sure why I would need to know this unless I was specifically in the sec world.
The last 3 questions were actually general CS because they went through search trees and shortest paths algos, which are language-agnostic.
But the quiz specifically mentions on multiple answers that "In Python, unlike language X, Y, Z" OR "In Python, like [similar language] A, B, C"...I mean this says nothing about my programming ability, this says whether I know the quirks of the language in the same way that I can tell you all the quirks of JavaScript but not in Python. This to me is not a programming quiz, but a Python quiz designed to determine how much someone knows about what can go wrong in Python.