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Would like to spend time in a good mind blowing problem solving discussion

Answer 1

+2 A:

The book Programming Pearls is full of good questions and discussions, and often turned into interview questions.

sarnold 2010-08-13 09:59:33

Answer 2

+5 A:

I ran into an interesting Perl problem a couple months ago.

Explain when and why

 system( 'sleep 86400' );

is better than

 sleep 86400;

A lot of people rush to what they think is an obvious answer, but the person using system was no dummy.

Two interview questions that I like to ask are:

What five things to you hate about your favorite language?
What five things would you miss the most if they disappeared from Perl?

Also remember, however, that 9 out of 10 people that call themselves expert in something are just setting themselves up for failure in an interview. :)

brian d foy 2010-08-13 11:05:13

It's a long sleep (1 day) so you might want to interrupt it. Using `system` you can kill the external sleeping process and let the script continue. This is not possible when using `sleep`, cause you'd kill the whole script.

kixx 2010-08-13 11:25:47

Out of curiosity, what would be a good usecase for a long (12h+) sleep (by either method) that wouldn't be better accomplished by cron/at?

szbalint 2010-08-13 11:57:40

Unless you're hiring someone to program in 5 different languages at equal skill, asking what they hate about their language isn't a very good question imo. If someone asked me that, and I program solely in C#, I would have no answer for it as I don't use any other languages that do things that C# cannot.

SLC 2010-08-13 12:11:44

@szbalint: I used a 24 hour sleep on an embedded system because there was no cron daemon available. (Of course, there was no perl available either. I used the Posix shell instead.)

Jochen Walter 2010-08-13 12:31:19

@szbalint: cron/at are not blocking operations... potentially one would want the process to be already running but dormant (in the middle of a sleep), but wakeable via a signal.

Ether 2010-08-13 16:49:31

@SLC: if there aren't things that you wish C# did differently, without knowing anything else about any other language, I would say that I don't think you've done enough in C#. That's the point of the question. Surely something in C# annoys you and you can find 5 things to change that would make your job easier.

brian d foy 2010-08-14 10:04:39

@Brian: I don't understand, C# is to programming what a piece of paper is to an origami crane. I can't criticise the paper any more than I can criticise C#, they are just the tools that I use to create the finished product. I can't think of one thing I'd change because I don't know what's better.

SLC 2010-08-16 10:25:13

Well, I guess there's no hope for you then. I can probably list 15 ways I'd want paper to be better. Your answer, however, shows how valuable and creative you might be. It's something you should try to improve.

brian d foy 2010-08-16 17:19:08

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