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This is very python specific. While I got a 15/15 and can easily answer these, the reason for that lies with the fact that I am very fluent in Python, had I not

This is very python specific. While I got a 15/15 and can easily answer these, the reason for that lies with the fact that I am very fluent in Python, had I not been I would have not gotten at least 6-8 of these wrong. This isn't a generalist quiz, nor is it a good baseline for interviewing candidates for the hiring process, this wouldn't tell me anything about the application of their skillset.

cha5m 9y ago
Particularly the question(s?) about list mutability. That is such a language specific property.
squeaky-clean 9y ago
I took a quiz at the Facebook booth at PyCon this past weekend. It was Python specific, but had a few annoying gotchas. There was one question in there twice, but with 2 different values for the input (which is what tipped me off that it was a trick). It basically relied on this fact... x = 256 x is 256 # True y = 257 y is 257 # False Which for one, you shouldn't use `is` to compare integers in Python. I wish I could have just written that as my answer. Secondly, you need to be aware the CPython uses an integer cache which causes the answers to be different. You'll actually get different answers based on whether you run it as a file, enter it line-by-line into the interpreter, or use a different implementation such as PyPy. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15171695/whats-with-the-integer-cache-inside-python https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15171695/whats-with-the-... There wasn't any point to the quiz, so it's okay that they put in silly questions like that. But it's clearly there just to try and trick you, and not quiz you on anything relevant. Most of the other questions were tricks of the sort, or or Python 3 specific gotcha's.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  That's kind of nasty. It's certainly fun to play with pathological language features, but it's not exactly a useful thing to test on when the answer is "don't do that". I'd enjoy a JavaScript quiz on some of the "wat?" features, but I wouldn't want to be evaluated on my ability to guess them.
  - squeaky-clean 9y ago
    Seriously! I think these sort of tricks are really fun (I read IOCCC and other stuff), but I only know this because of a famous codegolf answer that takes advantage of this trick [0]. I wouldn't expect anyone else to know it, and don't consider it something positive or negative as far as programming skill is concerned. It's kind of related to interest, but admittedly I waste a lot of time playing with stupid details like this in programming languages, so maybe it actually makes me less productive than the average person. [0] "Write a program that makes 2 + 2 = 5" https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/28851 https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/28851 edit: wording change
- nebabyte 9y ago
  > There wasn't any point to the quiz Knowing fb, there might well have been; if they had a facial recognition webcam up and noted applicant scores no one would hear about it. They'd probably just call it an "experiment in hiring"
- teekert 9y ago
  As a Python beginner I'm completely flabbergasted... How can this be? And why can't I use "is" to compare integers? This is insane. The quoted stackoverflow is not very readable to me... By the way y == 257 does work.
  - kbp 9y ago
    "is" is for asking whether two objects are the same exact object in memory. "==" is for asking whether two objects are logically equal, ie, that they represent the same value. As an example: >>> x = [1,2,3] >>> y = [1,2,3] >>> x == y True # two lists with the same values; equal >>> x is y False # two different lists; doesn't matter that they contain the same values >>> z = x >>> z is x True # same list object in memory Because here you want to know if the two integers are logically equal, not if they're necessarily the same object in memory, you want "==" and not "is". Due to an optimisation, "is" might work for small integers, depending on implementation, but the takeaway is not to use "is" for value comparisons; that's what "==" is for.
    - mattbreeden 9y ago
      To expand on this, python creates some values as singletons to save memory/speed things up because they are used so often. The most well known examples are True/False/None. That's why you can always do None is None, because all None are the same None in memory. Python takes this a step further by creating lower integer singletons. So any integer from 0-256 (not sure about negatives) will always be the same number in memory. Above 256 python will start actually allocating memory for integers, so two of the same number won't be at the same memory address, and there for won't be comparable by 'is'.
      - bakery2k 9y ago
        0-256 not sure about negatives -5 to 256 (inclusive) [https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/longobject.c#L18 https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/longob...]
  - 9y ago
- makmanalp 9y ago
  I took the same quiz, and noticed the exact same. When I saw the first one, my thought was "crap, I don't remember how many integers python interns", and then I saw the next question and figured it out, but it was sort of silly that a lot of their test was stuff like this that can easily be looked up and can change by implementation (e.g. does pypy do the same? ironpython?) Plus, I was a bit mad that they wouldn't tell you which ones you got right or wrong, or even how many. Why did I bother taking it then?
  - squeaky-clean 9y ago
    Yeah, they never emailed me the scores either, and told me there was no way to know at the booth... I even joked with them that they were just trying to link it to my fb profile. I actually didn't catch the trick until I asked someone later if they had gotten the same problem twice, "Almost, but the values were different" which is when I realized it (I blame the beer during opening night). However, as I found out today, because the way they worded the question it was all on a single line (if I remember correctly). So both cases should actually have been True, and I was right both times :P > (e.g. does pypy do the same? ironpython?) I wasted... ahem, spent a few hours today playing with this and found a few things, it's pretty neat! In PyPy, `is` will always be True for primitives. This also means NaN is NaN (but still never == NaN). It doesn't use memory location for things like id() like CPython does, but it guarantees you get a unique representation. [0] In CPython (3.5.2), it will always cache [-5, 256]. Here's the code that creates that array at startup [1] and each possible init/copy function calls this first to see if it's a cached int [2]. But it can sometimes cache other values! It also depends on if you do it from a module or the repl, and it's different depending on what scope or line each name/value is on. This one weirded out some coworkers, all from one continuous repl session: >>> x = 500 >>> x is 500 False >>> x = 500; x is 500 True >>> def wat(): ... x = 500 ... return x is 500 >>> wat() True >>> x = 500 >>> def wat_wat(): ... return x is 500 >>> wat_wat() False If you run it from a script you instead get True, True, True, False. You can disassemble it to get a hint at why. One uses STORE_FAST and LOAD_FAST, and the other LOAD_GLOBAL. >>> disassemble(wat.__code__) 2 0 LOAD_CONST 1 (500) 3 STORE_FAST 0 (x) 3 6 LOAD_FAST 0 (x) 9 LOAD_CONST 1 (500) 12 COMPARE_OP 8 (is) 15 RETURN_VALUE >>> disassemble(wat_wat.__code__) 2 0 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (x) 3 LOAD_CONST 1 (500) 6 COMPARE_OP 8 (is) 9 RETURN_VALUE Now I'm still trying to figure out why STORE_FAST and LOAD_FAST cause it to use the same object, and why those only get called when it's interpreted together. When I figure this out I might put together a longer post about all this. Also don't use `is` for comparing integers. ;) [0] http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/cpython_differences.html#object-identity-of-primitive-values-is-and-id http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/cpython_differences.html#objec... [1] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/longobject.c#L5491 https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/longob... [2] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/ba85d69a3e3610bdd05f0dd372cf4ebca178c7fb/Objects/longobject.c#L63 https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/ba85d69a3e3610bdd05f0...
jordansmithnz 9y ago
Yeah, I have very little (basically none) python experience, and stumbled on some of the earlier quesitons. I found myself guessing, not from lack of problem solving skills, but purely on how the language works. It would have been helpful if each question had the relevant language specific information - for example, reference/value semantics.
RangerScience 9y ago
+1 ditto. So far questions 3 and 4 were about how Python handles references, question 5 is then about Python scoping. The rest are pretty good. For a few questions, I also just booted up my Python shell, rather than comprehending the script. :/
johnfn 9y ago
The only thing that was truly python specific was the UTF8 question - you'd need to know the library. The stuff about reference equality is pretty common in almost every language that abstracts away pointers - js, ruby, c#... The thing about closures was a basic closure question that anyone with experience in a language about closures could answer.
- eveningcoffee 9y ago
  I would argue that UTF8 was a character encoding knowledge question. Two of the answers were clearly wrong and the array did contains values over 127, so there was only a single possible logical answer.
- fenomas 9y ago
  I only looked at three questions, but two of them were entirely Python specific. Question 2 asks you to choose between: queue.extend(node) queue.extend([node]) queue.extend(node.children) Sure, I could take a guess which one of those appends the contents of "node" to the end of "queue", but I'd be guessing about syntax, not programming. After that, and question 3 about what happens when you assign to a function argument, I realized it was a Python quiz and stopped reading.
  - ammon 9y ago
    The intent was that node.children would be the giveaway. The question is about BFS, and you'll notice that only one of the answers references the node's children (in a sensible way). The intent was that that would be enough to answer it without knowing python queue syntax (for what it's worth, I know python well and don't have the deque API in my head)
    - fenomas 9y ago
      Thanks for the explanation, please see sibling comment for context. I think that a comment like # assume "node" is an object with "value" and "children" properties would make this question clearer.
  - 9y ago
MaulingMonkey 9y ago
I consider myself barely Python literate (I've modified maybe 5 python scripts in my life) but also managed 15/15. Most of the relevant core semantics are extremely common to dynamically typed scripting languages: - Reference semantics for pretty much everything, except perhaps basic types such as integers - but those are generally "immutable" (e.g. no 5.add(6) mutating the "original object" in-place) making by-reference vs by-value moot. - Arguments copy the reference, they do not alias the original reference. - Mutating functions, if the return value isn't being used, are either being misused (e.g. the code has a bug) or mutate the original object in-place. - Closures alias the same variables This could be JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Powershell, Squirrel, PHP, ... hell, even a lot of the compiled statically typed languages share similar semantics. I'd expect someone coming from, say, a pure C/C++ background to have some trouble though, which is perhaps the point you're getting at.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
xxs 9y ago
I have managed to get 15/15 without =any= prior knowledge of use of python (treated it like Java in terms of local variables). Actually I don't know if the Python has integer types. Hardest question regular expression one (mostly because regular expressions are the type of write-only code to me) that being said. Some remarks about questions: 1st fails for all NaN/empty. Returning negative infinity is hardly a good choice for an array full of NaN. 2nd I didn't like this one: "children" comes from nowhere. There is no 'definition' of order, so 'first' is quite confusing, perhaps 'any' suits better. 5th I'd have expected white spaces in the toString rendering of the array (checked via inspect element). Had to make some assumptions. 7th since only variables i1 and i2 are defined and 3rd/4th answers make no sense as loop predicates, the entire merge function body is rather pointless. 8th About the correct answer:: One problem with ASCII is that it only support English characters (and a few other European languages). The characters are Latin and even Ural based languages like Estonian/Finnish/Hungarian use the same base for alphabet. "Unicode is like ASCII, but larger.", I'd never consider them a"like", for instance converting hexdecimal numbers to their asciis code is 5byte assembly for 8086. Also ascii is sort of a code page while unicode tries to combine all code pages together. 10th But because they share memory with other threads in the same process, threads must synchronize access to shared data to maintain data integrity. "Synchronize access" implies certain data model/locking paradigm. It's possible to have entirely lock free/copy-on-write multithreaded code that will exhibit no need for explicit synchronization. Alternatively some code could still be correct with benign data races (but that usually comes close to poking the dragons) 11th best practice is generally to use prepared statements, which lets the database itself protect against SQL injections. The statement is not necessarily true, the prepared statement could be just standard execution with parameters being escaped by the database driver (client), technically still performing the escaping part. 12th Side channel, timing attack is correct but virtually impossible to observe due to the very short nature of hashes and the fact they are all in the L1 by the time the check is performed -- even SHA512 is just one cache line, processing the comparing function yields 10ns or so time difference. The real concern is "the user_submitted_hash" -- users should not be submitting hashes directly as that precludes salting and invalidates use of any =slow= hashing function as the attacker just submits more hashes. IMO a bad question. 14th One advantage of DFS, however, is that it uses much less memory. BFS must store a queue of nodes to visit, and this queue can grow to (order) the size of the entire graph. The statement is not universality true and the worst case scenario is the same, a good answer https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/299 https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/299. More importantly DFS can be executed in parallel. I started reading the green part after first few answers, hopefully the remarks are useful (and not snark).
eveningcoffee 9y ago
>This isn't a generalist quiz, nor is it a good baseline for interviewing candidates for the hiring process I believe that it tries to be a bait and rubbish filter at the same time.
ppoint 9y ago
Agreed. No knowledge in Python. How am I supposed to know specifics of x.append() and x = y within the same function?
bumbledraven 9y ago
I've written maybe 10 lines of Python in my life, and I got 15/15. They did a good job explaining the Python-specific stuff with comments.
Aeolun 9y ago
The fact that it's python specific wasn't stated anywhere. I'm like 'is this argument a reference or a copy?' what am I supposed to do then. The problem is that the function makes no frigging sense without the argument being a reference, so you're naturally forced to assume that it is.

cha5m 9y ago

Particularly the question(s?) about list mutability. That is such a language specific property.

squeaky-clean 9y ago

I took a quiz at the Facebook booth at PyCon this past weekend. It was Python specific, but had a few annoying gotchas. There was one question in there twice, but with 2 different values for the input (which is what tipped me off that it was a trick). It basically relied on this fact... x = 256 x is 256 # True y = 257 y is 257 # False Which for one, you shouldn't use `is` to compare integers in Python. I wish I could have just written that as my answer. Secondly, you need to be aware the CPython uses an integer cache which causes the answers to be different. You'll actually get different answers based on whether you run it as a file, enter it line-by-line into the interpreter, or use a different implementation such as PyPy. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15171695/whats-with-the-integer-cache-inside-python https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15171695/whats-with-the-... There wasn't any point to the quiz, so it's okay that they put in silly questions like that. But it's clearly there just to try and trick you, and not quiz you on anything relevant. Most of the other questions were tricks of the sort, or or Python 3 specific gotcha's.

Bartweiss 9y ago
That's kind of nasty. It's certainly fun to play with pathological language features, but it's not exactly a useful thing to test on when the answer is "don't do that". I'd enjoy a JavaScript quiz on some of the "wat?" features, but I wouldn't want to be evaluated on my ability to guess them.
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
  Seriously! I think these sort of tricks are really fun (I read IOCCC and other stuff), but I only know this because of a famous codegolf answer that takes advantage of this trick [0]. I wouldn't expect anyone else to know it, and don't consider it something positive or negative as far as programming skill is concerned. It's kind of related to interest, but admittedly I waste a lot of time playing with stupid details like this in programming languages, so maybe it actually makes me less productive than the average person. [0] "Write a program that makes 2 + 2 = 5" https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/28851 https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/28851 edit: wording change
nebabyte 9y ago
> There wasn't any point to the quiz Knowing fb, there might well have been; if they had a facial recognition webcam up and noted applicant scores no one would hear about it. They'd probably just call it an "experiment in hiring"
teekert 9y ago
As a Python beginner I'm completely flabbergasted... How can this be? And why can't I use "is" to compare integers? This is insane. The quoted stackoverflow is not very readable to me... By the way y == 257 does work.
- kbp 9y ago
  "is" is for asking whether two objects are the same exact object in memory. "==" is for asking whether two objects are logically equal, ie, that they represent the same value. As an example: >>> x = [1,2,3] >>> y = [1,2,3] >>> x == y True # two lists with the same values; equal >>> x is y False # two different lists; doesn't matter that they contain the same values >>> z = x >>> z is x True # same list object in memory Because here you want to know if the two integers are logically equal, not if they're necessarily the same object in memory, you want "==" and not "is". Due to an optimisation, "is" might work for small integers, depending on implementation, but the takeaway is not to use "is" for value comparisons; that's what "==" is for.
  - mattbreeden 9y ago
    To expand on this, python creates some values as singletons to save memory/speed things up because they are used so often. The most well known examples are True/False/None. That's why you can always do None is None, because all None are the same None in memory. Python takes this a step further by creating lower integer singletons. So any integer from 0-256 (not sure about negatives) will always be the same number in memory. Above 256 python will start actually allocating memory for integers, so two of the same number won't be at the same memory address, and there for won't be comparable by 'is'.
    - bakery2k 9y ago
      0-256 not sure about negatives -5 to 256 (inclusive) [https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/longobject.c#L18 https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/longob...]
- 9y ago
makmanalp 9y ago
I took the same quiz, and noticed the exact same. When I saw the first one, my thought was "crap, I don't remember how many integers python interns", and then I saw the next question and figured it out, but it was sort of silly that a lot of their test was stuff like this that can easily be looked up and can change by implementation (e.g. does pypy do the same? ironpython?) Plus, I was a bit mad that they wouldn't tell you which ones you got right or wrong, or even how many. Why did I bother taking it then?
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
  Yeah, they never emailed me the scores either, and told me there was no way to know at the booth... I even joked with them that they were just trying to link it to my fb profile. I actually didn't catch the trick until I asked someone later if they had gotten the same problem twice, "Almost, but the values were different" which is when I realized it (I blame the beer during opening night). However, as I found out today, because the way they worded the question it was all on a single line (if I remember correctly). So both cases should actually have been True, and I was right both times :P > (e.g. does pypy do the same? ironpython?) I wasted... ahem, spent a few hours today playing with this and found a few things, it's pretty neat! In PyPy, `is` will always be True for primitives. This also means NaN is NaN (but still never == NaN). It doesn't use memory location for things like id() like CPython does, but it guarantees you get a unique representation. [0] In CPython (3.5.2), it will always cache [-5, 256]. Here's the code that creates that array at startup [1] and each possible init/copy function calls this first to see if it's a cached int [2]. But it can sometimes cache other values! It also depends on if you do it from a module or the repl, and it's different depending on what scope or line each name/value is on. This one weirded out some coworkers, all from one continuous repl session: >>> x = 500 >>> x is 500 False >>> x = 500; x is 500 True >>> def wat(): ... x = 500 ... return x is 500 >>> wat() True >>> x = 500 >>> def wat_wat(): ... return x is 500 >>> wat_wat() False If you run it from a script you instead get True, True, True, False. You can disassemble it to get a hint at why. One uses STORE_FAST and LOAD_FAST, and the other LOAD_GLOBAL. >>> disassemble(wat.__code__) 2 0 LOAD_CONST 1 (500) 3 STORE_FAST 0 (x) 3 6 LOAD_FAST 0 (x) 9 LOAD_CONST 1 (500) 12 COMPARE_OP 8 (is) 15 RETURN_VALUE >>> disassemble(wat_wat.__code__) 2 0 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (x) 3 LOAD_CONST 1 (500) 6 COMPARE_OP 8 (is) 9 RETURN_VALUE Now I'm still trying to figure out why STORE_FAST and LOAD_FAST cause it to use the same object, and why those only get called when it's interpreted together. When I figure this out I might put together a longer post about all this. Also don't use `is` for comparing integers. ;) [0] http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/cpython_differences.html#object-identity-of-primitive-values-is-and-id http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/cpython_differences.html#objec... [1] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/longobject.c#L5491 https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/longob... [2] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/ba85d69a3e3610bdd05f0dd372cf4ebca178c7fb/Objects/longobject.c#L63 https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/ba85d69a3e3610bdd05f0...

jordansmithnz 9y ago

Yeah, I have very little (basically none) python experience, and stumbled on some of the earlier quesitons. I found myself guessing, not from lack of problem solving skills, but purely on how the language works. It would have been helpful if each question had the relevant language specific information - for example, reference/value semantics.

RangerScience 9y ago

+1 ditto. So far questions 3 and 4 were about how Python handles references, question 5 is then about Python scoping. The rest are pretty good. For a few questions, I also just booted up my Python shell, rather than comprehending the script. :/

johnfn 9y ago

The only thing that was truly python specific was the UTF8 question - you'd need to know the library. The stuff about reference equality is pretty common in almost every language that abstracts away pointers - js, ruby, c#... The thing about closures was a basic closure question that anyone with experience in a language about closures could answer.

eveningcoffee 9y ago
I would argue that UTF8 was a character encoding knowledge question. Two of the answers were clearly wrong and the array did contains values over 127, so there was only a single possible logical answer.
fenomas 9y ago
I only looked at three questions, but two of them were entirely Python specific. Question 2 asks you to choose between: queue.extend(node) queue.extend([node]) queue.extend(node.children) Sure, I could take a guess which one of those appends the contents of "node" to the end of "queue", but I'd be guessing about syntax, not programming. After that, and question 3 about what happens when you assign to a function argument, I realized it was a Python quiz and stopped reading.
- ammon 9y ago
  The intent was that node.children would be the giveaway. The question is about BFS, and you'll notice that only one of the answers references the node's children (in a sensible way). The intent was that that would be enough to answer it without knowing python queue syntax (for what it's worth, I know python well and don't have the deque API in my head)
  - fenomas 9y ago
    Thanks for the explanation, please see sibling comment for context. I think that a comment like # assume "node" is an object with "value" and "children" properties would make this question clearer.
- 9y ago

MaulingMonkey 9y ago

I consider myself barely Python literate (I've modified maybe 5 python scripts in my life) but also managed 15/15. Most of the relevant core semantics are extremely common to dynamically typed scripting languages: - Reference semantics for pretty much everything, except perhaps basic types such as integers - but those are generally "immutable" (e.g. no 5.add(6) mutating the "original object" in-place) making by-reference vs by-value moot. - Arguments copy the reference, they do not alias the original reference. - Mutating functions, if the return value isn't being used, are either being misused (e.g. the code has a bug) or mutate the original object in-place. - Closures alias the same variables This could be JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Powershell, Squirrel, PHP, ... hell, even a lot of the compiled statically typed languages share similar semantics. I'd expect someone coming from, say, a pure C/C++ background to have some trouble though, which is perhaps the point you're getting at.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

xxs 9y ago

I have managed to get 15/15 without =any= prior knowledge of use of python (treated it like Java in terms of local variables). Actually I don't know if the Python has integer types. Hardest question regular expression one (mostly because regular expressions are the type of write-only code to me) that being said. Some remarks about questions: 1st fails for all NaN/empty. Returning negative infinity is hardly a good choice for an array full of NaN. 2nd I didn't like this one: "children" comes from nowhere. There is no 'definition' of order, so 'first' is quite confusing, perhaps 'any' suits better. 5th I'd have expected white spaces in the toString rendering of the array (checked via inspect element). Had to make some assumptions. 7th since only variables i1 and i2 are defined and 3rd/4th answers make no sense as loop predicates, the entire merge function body is rather pointless. 8th About the correct answer:: One problem with ASCII is that it only support English characters (and a few other European languages). The characters are Latin and even Ural based languages like Estonian/Finnish/Hungarian use the same base for alphabet. "Unicode is like ASCII, but larger.", I'd never consider them a"like", for instance converting hexdecimal numbers to their asciis code is 5byte assembly for 8086. Also ascii is sort of a code page while unicode tries to combine all code pages together. 10th But because they share memory with other threads in the same process, threads must synchronize access to shared data to maintain data integrity. "Synchronize access" implies certain data model/locking paradigm. It's possible to have entirely lock free/copy-on-write multithreaded code that will exhibit no need for explicit synchronization. Alternatively some code could still be correct with benign data races (but that usually comes close to poking the dragons) 11th best practice is generally to use prepared statements, which lets the database itself protect against SQL injections. The statement is not necessarily true, the prepared statement could be just standard execution with parameters being escaped by the database driver (client), technically still performing the escaping part. 12th Side channel, timing attack is correct but virtually impossible to observe due to the very short nature of hashes and the fact they are all in the L1 by the time the check is performed -- even SHA512 is just one cache line, processing the comparing function yields 10ns or so time difference. The real concern is "the user_submitted_hash" -- users should not be submitting hashes directly as that precludes salting and invalidates use of any =slow= hashing function as the attacker just submits more hashes. IMO a bad question. 14th One advantage of DFS, however, is that it uses much less memory. BFS must store a queue of nodes to visit, and this queue can grow to (order) the size of the entire graph. The statement is not universality true and the worst case scenario is the same, a good answer https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/299 https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/299. More importantly DFS can be executed in parallel. I started reading the green part after first few answers, hopefully the remarks are useful (and not snark).

eveningcoffee 9y ago

>This isn't a generalist quiz, nor is it a good baseline for interviewing candidates for the hiring process I believe that it tries to be a bait and rubbish filter at the same time.

ppoint 9y ago

Agreed. No knowledge in Python. How am I supposed to know specifics of x.append() and x = y within the same function?

bumbledraven 9y ago

I've written maybe 10 lines of Python in my life, and I got 15/15. They did a good job explaining the Python-specific stuff with comments.

Aeolun 9y ago

The fact that it's python specific wasn't stated anywhere. I'm like 'is this argument a reference or a copy?' what am I supposed to do then. The problem is that the function makes no frigging sense without the argument being a reference, so you're naturally forced to assume that it is.