Re:Show HN: I send out a weekly CS topic overview and code i...
by JoshTriplett on Thursday December 13, 2012 @06:43PM
(#4918795)
> Some of the best, most creative and versatile programmers I have known could not write code without a set of reference books next to them. Why? Because they don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the various languages they might use
You don't have to know everything about a language to solve problems in that language; if you need a set of reference books next to you for the languages you use every day, you don't know those languages very well.
And a good interviewer will help you with discussion, if you have a reasonable approach to the problem: "I think there's a function to do foo, but I'd have to check the documentation to find the details." "It's called foomod.foo_doer; it takes a baz and a bar." "Ah, thanks. scribble scribble". (Or, alternatively, "I'm assuming a function foo_doer to do foo, which I think exists in the standard library, but if not I could write it easily enough.")
You don't have to know everything about a language to solve problems in that language; if you need a set of reference books next to you for the languages you use every day, you don't know those languages very well.
And a good interviewer will help you with discussion, if you have a reasonable approach to the problem: "I think there's a function to do foo, but I'd have to check the documentation to find the details." "It's called foomod.foo_doer; it takes a baz and a bar." "Ah, thanks. scribble scribble". (Or, alternatively, "I'm assuming a function foo_doer to do foo, which I think exists in the standard library, but if not I could write it easily enough.")