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Well I know fairly small company where people pretty much expected every candidate to be deeply familiar with The Art of Computer Programming Book by Donald Knu
by qaq 8y ago
Well I know fairly small company where people pretty much expected every candidate to be deeply familiar with The Art of Computer Programming Book by Donald Knuth. The even funnier part it was 100% PHP shop.
- jarsin 8y agoI find that impossible to believe :)
- qaq 8y agoeven more funny it was internal payment processor @ large porn conglomerate in Eastern Europe.
- golergka 8y agoWhy is it funny? That seems like exactly the high load, high availability requirements that would require software quality way higher than in a typical SV app that never gets above 1k DAU.
- qaq 8y agoThe payment processing side is not really high load
- darylfritz 8y agoI feel like there's a pun in here somewhere... ಠ_ಠ
- qaq 8y agoThey did write a functional framework and used "only" immutable vars though.
- colanderman 8y agoWhich is ironic, given the largely imperative approach taken by TAoCP.
- Acen 8y agoI'm not sure why people still have problems with modern PHP. Why is that funny?
- qaq 8y agoYou know many people who are enough into CS to go through "The Art of Computer Programming" multiple times but yet use PHP a lot? Modern PHP is OK but I doubt it's a good default choice at present given all the alternatives.
- ewjordan 8y agoIf a company already has a large PHP codebase, then it's probably the right choice to stick with it. And it can scale just fine, easily as well as Python or Ruby if you dig into how to do it right. But to manage scalable PHP (or any language, for that matter) you still need smart programmers, a lot of whom will have been through most of the serious academic works in the field. They won't love working with PHP (I never did), and it might mean greater flight risk (yup!), but they might join the job anyways (at least half a dozen people that I know with those creds that joined up with the last project I was on where we had no choice but to deal with PHP) because of other reasons, like liking the company, people, or goals. I've worked with a dozen different languages over the last 20 years. PHP is not one that I'd pick for a new project, but TBH, it's not the worst I've had to deal with. My experiences with the Visual Basic, Perl, and R code that I've had to interact with were actually far worse (typically because the people that code them are not as solid in software engineering), but I wouldn't judge people that use them just based on having done so. Unless we're spinning up new prototypes, very few of us actually get to choose the technologies that we use.
- arwhatever 8y agoI've learned to avoid vb.net shops not because of the language per se, but because of the culture that allows for sticking with something that has widely considered legacy for some time now. I know this is painting with a broad brush, and I'm working from a sample size of 2 (or, 2 vb.net shops that I've worked with), and the software engineering culture as a whole was really bad on those teams.
- wglb 8y agoI bought the first volume of TAoCP when it came out. The number of people that I know that are "deeply familiar with The Art of Computer Programming" approaches zero. I have read some sections in great detail, but won't claim deep familiarity. I don't know of anyone who has read the whole thing. I am a bit skeptical of this claim.
- qaq 8y agoThat is exactly why this is funny :). You have to dif. expected and actually were able to find. From my understanding only the CTO would more or less actually fit the description.