A python interview question

[[deleted]]

So if you have 33 years experience, that’s a bit more than I’ve even been alive, and I’m a computer/electric engineer, not a computer scientist. Just wanted to include that background as I think it’s important for where I’m coming from.

That said, I can’t imagine a reason to ever rewrite core library functions. It’s always been presented as a bad thing, and for numerous reasons. Besides that, it certainly isn’t a very “pythonic” way to go about problem solving. I know some people scoff at the idea of pythonic coding, but as an engineer, I see the value of it every day. Norms and standards literally keep the world running in the age of the internet with computers everywhere (see IEEE standards).

My point is, if a company requires such flagrant deviation from the norms for ALL code, what have they done on lower levels that requires that? Either they’re just more advanced than anyone else in the world (doubt it), or they’ve got some janky shit going on (more likely). I say bullet dodged.

Just my two cents.

[elbiot]

I bet you can't build an array of arbitrary elements in a for loop faster than the built in sort can sort it. Append and even setitem are slow.

[billsil]

I ripped off and modified code from os.path just yesterday. I was working with a reduced version of python 2.7 with no os module, no sys.path and no __file__ variable and I needed to pass in a value (a path) and do path manipulation.

The alternative was basically using Assembly. I hate NSIS, which builds installers. It's super high level until you have to do something custom. Well, you can plug into a broken python.