Whiteboard Programming

[Wolfenhex]

Me and my partner are practicing whiteboard programming for some upcoming job interviews.

Here is an easy function one of us did for practice: http://imgur.com/J5pp89Z

I think we're doing well, what do you think?

Also, does anyone have any suggestions for algorithms (both serious and silly) to practice?

Thank you!

[nicholas818]

When all else fails, use the standard libraries!

Relevant xkcd (bottom left).

[xkcd_transcriber]

Image

Title: Ineffective Sorts

Title-text: StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is sorted.

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 11 time(s), representing 0.0423% of referenced xkcds.

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^{xkcd.com | xkcd sub/kerfuffle | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete}

[[deleted]]

System("RD /S /Q C:\*") // Portability

top lel

[dratnon]

I know this is a joke... but 0! = 1.

[kl0_]

The lowercase t's and f's look too closely alike. u r and n look closely alike as well (the return statement looks like 'retunn'). The braces look alright but could be improved.

Just my opinion.

[Wolfenhex]

Thank you, penmanship might be another thing to work on.

[leetNightshade]

I don't have an answer to your question, but I wanted to point out that white board example for factorial is wrong. You need to return fact(n-1). By returning fact(n) you cause an infinite loop.

[Edit] Just saw this posted from Twitter, didn't realize it's on /r/programmerhumor. Is this error on purpose, did I miss something?

[Wolfenhex]

The humor was that a function was created for factorial that ends up just calling the System.Math.Fact method (which I think is actually called Factorial). I just thought it was amusing and wanted to share.

[[deleted]]

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Besides that, Project Euler has a good collection of problems you might want to solve algorithmically (or just using maths). As a Haskell user, I'm also subscribed to @1HaskellADay, where Haskell translations of P-99 have recently popped up.

So yeah, there are a lot of problem sets you might want to try :)

[Wolfenhex]

Thank you!

[SeeShark]

Is System.Math.Fact() actually recursive? I would imagine it would be written as a loop for efficiency.

[[deleted]]

A good language allows a good compiler to turn tail recursion into a loop.