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Hitting an API endpoint, pulling data out of a database. Areas that already have an implicit schema require you to explicitly redefine that schema within your a

Hitting an API endpoint, pulling data out of a database. Areas that already have an implicit schema require you to explicitly redefine that schema within your application. I say this not just from personal preference, but I've proctored many timed coding challenges that were language agnostic. The challenge involved consuming data from a handful of API endpoints and compiling a response. Most statically typed solutions took twice the time of a dynamically typed one. We catered the time limit to the static case and it was a simple pass fail so no bonus points for doing it faster, but there was a strong advantage to the dynamic languages. Note: This is very much alleviated with typed interchange formats like protobuf.

hesdeadjim 10y ago
That coding challenge sounds like a far cry from developing even a prototype application. What was the skill level of the people doing it? Had they had experience in both dynamic and static types languages? What were the languages, Java or something modern? Edit: I don't mean this to be snarky, I just feel that it is not a very good experiment to draw conclusions from.
- phamilton 10y ago
  We prepped them ahead of time telling them that they would need to produce an HTTP API that accepted requests and returned a response compiled from multiple HTTP endpoints. It's basically an orchestration layer, and I've done similar things in production many times. ("If we exposed X to the clients, we could allow action Y. Would action Y contribute to our goal of Z?" Instead of building a highly performant correct solution, we would do an on the fly derivation of the data needed, launch it for 5% and see the experiment results.) It was for all candidates, meant to test ability to understand a problem and prototype a solution quickly. Edit: most candidates did Java/Scala/Python/Ruby.

hesdeadjim 10y ago

That coding challenge sounds like a far cry from developing even a prototype application. What was the skill level of the people doing it? Had they had experience in both dynamic and static types languages? What were the languages, Java or something modern? Edit: I don't mean this to be snarky, I just feel that it is not a very good experiment to draw conclusions from.

phamilton 10y ago
We prepped them ahead of time telling them that they would need to produce an HTTP API that accepted requests and returned a response compiled from multiple HTTP endpoints. It's basically an orchestration layer, and I've done similar things in production many times. ("If we exposed X to the clients, we could allow action Y. Would action Y contribute to our goal of Z?" Instead of building a highly performant correct solution, we would do an on the fly derivation of the data needed, launch it for 5% and see the experiment results.) It was for all candidates, meant to test ability to understand a problem and prototype a solution quickly. Edit: most candidates did Java/Scala/Python/Ruby.