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I don't think esoterica is entirely useless in an interviewing context. I've interviewed a few people for language centric positions before and one thing I like
by DannoHung 15y ago
I don't think esoterica is entirely useless in an interviewing context. I've interviewed a few people for language centric positions before and one thing I liked to ask was, "What feature or piece of this language do you find interesting or frustrating?" Someone who's worked a lot with a particular technology is bound to have something meaningful to say. I suppose they could just not be particularly thoughtful about their tools, but I like working with thoughtful people.
- pgeorgi 15y agoThe problem is with requiring knowledge about a certain set of "esoterica". Your question is fine: it's open-ended, the interviewees can answer whatever they feel like (and you can assess their knowledge of the language to some degree), and ideally you get a nice little discussion going, that also covers other topics. On the other hand "What's up with that explicit keyword and constructors in c++?" is a pop quiz questions.
- trustfundbaby 15y agoI agree ... as long as you don't use said esoterica as an immediate qualifier/disqualifier, it can give you an interesting insight the depth of knowledge a candidate has about a particular language. That being said, there are people who know crazy minutae but get into a team and simply can't turn out code at the rate you need them too, for whatever reason. Definitely have to watch for that and pay more attention to how they actually construct and write code.
- xsmasher 15y agoAgreed. I've met some "language lawyers" that know the standards and libraries by heart, but can't seem to combine them to solve problems. Or they can, but they create overblown space-shuttle architectures that solve a metaproblem that far exceeds the actual problem at hand.
- dalke 15y agoI've found that I don't think about languages that way. I think of things more like "I want to achieve goal X; what are the interesting or frustrating aspects with respect to that goal?" For example, someone asked me once about the warts in Python. I started thinking about complaints I've heard others say, like Python 2.x's "print >>fileobj" syntax. I understand the reasons for and against it, but I nearly only use print statements for debugging, so it's not one that I want to bring up. Or there's the lack of block syntax, which Smalltalk/Ruby developers love, but Python has different ways to handle most of the underlying requirements. So there I'm thinking about the different aspect of Python, trying to figure out which ones I want to bring up, but I hadn't fully considered the other issues with the language, in order to figure out which is the most relevant, but then, I don't know how to rank the relevancy because the question was structured without any rank preference. Now if you had asked "... when used for systems programming ..." or "... as a programming language for scientists ..." or "... compared with Perl ..." then I would find it much easier to give the thoughtful answer you're looking for. I had the same problem a couple of years back at our monthly Python meetings. We did a code refactoring exercise: given code, make it better. I had a really tough time because I couldn't figure out what "better" meant. The exercise code worked, although it mixed business logic, database interface, and presentation into a single file. But without an idea of the direction the code was supposed to go for the future, I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to modify working code.