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A comment on Ask HN: coding challenges as part of interviews: yes or no?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: coding challenges as part of interviews: yes or no? by ntoshev on Thursday May 29, 2008 @01:41PM (#203459)
Ability requires memory, at least for basic things.

You can't be a good programmer and forget the syntax of the language you are working in. If you need to look up something as fundamental as switch statement in the internet, it's like a writer looking up words in the dictionary before writing them down in his novel.

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Re:Ask HN: coding challenges as part of interviews: yes or no? by jonknee on Thursday May 29, 2008 @02:03PM (#203482)
Writers very frequently use the dictionary. There is no problem with it, that's why we have dictionaries.
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Re:Ask HN: coding challenges as part of interviews: yes or no? by eru on Thursday May 29, 2008 @02:35PM (#203527)
Not for scrabble disputes?
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Re:Ask HN: coding challenges as part of interviews: yes or no? by jcromartie on Thursday May 29, 2008 @01:47PM (#203464)
I think switch is a particularly bad example here. Honestly, I can't (accurately) tell you the last time I used one. It's not an every-day construct for a lot of people.
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Re:Ask HN: coding challenges as part of interviews: yes or no? by eru on Thursday May 29, 2008 @02:36PM (#203529)
Neither Python nor Haskell have it - as far as I know. Perhaps you can create one out of monads though.
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Re:Ask HN: coding challenges as part of interviews: yes or no? by lsb on Thursday May 29, 2008 @02:46PM (#203540)
Actually, case is built into Haskell: it's the evaluation primitive in Haskell Core; see Don Stewart's blog post http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2008/05/16 .
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Re:Ask HN: coding challenges as part of interviews: yes or no? by eru on Friday May 30, 2008 @06:56AM (#204222)
Yes, there it is. Sorry, I did not research my claim.

Actually pattern matching can also be described as something like a case-switch.

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