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Don't Be an Evolutionary Programmer
- eesmith 3y agoThe author is describing a randomized search method, and not an evolutionary method. Stochastic optimization like this includes evolutionary algorithms but also other methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_optimization "Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations", says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution . The key part is populations. That's why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_computation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_computation also described evolutionary computation as "a family of population-based trial and error problem solvers with a metaheuristic or stochastic optimization character". Hacking away at a single code base is not working with a population of code bases, and certainly does not match the description at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_programming . Even those hacking away at a single code base are not making random changes, and we only have second-hand evidence that the interviewee "started mutating random parts of his code, and rerunning, just to see if that somehow fixed things". It's a junior programmer trying to build up an understanding of what the system is doing, but without the experience to know to go and re-examine the test input for validity.