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You would be surprised how much more relevant info programmers miss... Example, most programmers I know have no idea when a variable gets allocated on the stac

You would be surprised how much more relevant info programmers miss... Example, most programmers I know have no idea when a variable gets allocated on the stack and when it's on the heap. Let's not talk about how many dont even know what a (stack overflow)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_buffer_overflow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_buffer_overflow] is...

dhosek 4y ago
I remember being shocked to discover that a recent CS grad could not implement a factorial function using recursion. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to do that, but to not be able to do it?
- lumost 4y ago
  a lot of CS undergrads compress out recursion knowledge. They learn that most recursion is best skipped in favor of iteration/dp, and they learn that they should implement things efficiently. It’s possible the undergrad assumed you were referring to an efficient recursive algorithm or simply forgot most recursion.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    No, I was quite explicit, and seriously, is it really that hard to write something along the lines of if (i<=1) return i; else return factorial(i-1)*i; It wasn't meant to be a trick or trap, it was the simplest recursive function I could think of and it’s not like I was asking him to implement a stack.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  Heh, I just did the DS+A section of a Faang interview, and got the time and space complexity of an optimal solution more or less correct, as well as most of a recursive binary search implementation, but not quite there. I stumble with recursion because syntactically it's something you either have to use a lot or deliberately practice to have a keen sense of return values imo. Probably won't get an offer because of that. Do I feel like as a frontend engineer I really need that knowledge? Not really. I could work it out for work purposes if I needed to tho. I'd be practicing it just to pass interviews.
HideousKojima 4y ago
I'd venture 95% of JS and Python devs don't even know what the stack is. They might have some vague understanding of a reference type vs. a value type, but that's probably it. Even in something like C# or Java I'd guess it's less than half that know what they are.
Akronymus 4y ago
Diving into reverse engineering taught me just how little I know about assembly/call conventions and such. But it is highly educational.

dhosek 4y ago

I remember being shocked to discover that a recent CS grad could not implement a factorial function using recursion. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to do that, but to not be able to do it?

lumost 4y ago
a lot of CS undergrads compress out recursion knowledge. They learn that most recursion is best skipped in favor of iteration/dp, and they learn that they should implement things efficiently. It’s possible the undergrad assumed you were referring to an efficient recursive algorithm or simply forgot most recursion.
- dhosek 4y ago
  No, I was quite explicit, and seriously, is it really that hard to write something along the lines of if (i<=1) return i; else return factorial(i-1)*i; It wasn't meant to be a trick or trap, it was the simplest recursive function I could think of and it’s not like I was asking him to implement a stack.
brailsafe 4y ago
Heh, I just did the DS+A section of a Faang interview, and got the time and space complexity of an optimal solution more or less correct, as well as most of a recursive binary search implementation, but not quite there. I stumble with recursion because syntactically it's something you either have to use a lot or deliberately practice to have a keen sense of return values imo. Probably won't get an offer because of that. Do I feel like as a frontend engineer I really need that knowledge? Not really. I could work it out for work purposes if I needed to tho. I'd be practicing it just to pass interviews.

HideousKojima 4y ago

I'd venture 95% of JS and Python devs don't even know what the stack is. They might have some vague understanding of a reference type vs. a value type, but that's probably it. Even in something like C# or Java I'd guess it's less than half that know what they are.

Akronymus 4y ago

Diving into reverse engineering taught me just how little I know about assembly/call conventions and such. But it is highly educational.