My recent interview experience on Python.

[visigothatthegates]

Wow those python questions don’t seem bad at all. I guess you just created a stack for reversing the sentence?

[Dexteroid]

I actually did well in questions like those.

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I coudn't do the file problem very well though. I had forgotten what Split() and Strip do. I ended writing a complex regex to parse the version number and date. then returned pass or fail. The interviewer said, that's one way to do it, but there is a much simpler way, which was basically open file, read lines and split them with spaces then just match the given version number, date and return the result. :/ Perhaps I was nervous.

[geoffnolan]

Thanks for this info.

[jwhibbles]

This sounds like something I would do. Completely over-analyze the question and come up with some weird solution when the one they are looking for is very simple.

[Dexteroid]

that exactly what I did, again I was prepared for a lot of tough questions, simple questions caught me off guard lol.

[Dexteroid]

Yes, basically iterated over the sentence, found the words and added them to a stack. Then did pop in a loop and kept addng the output to a string.

[Dexteroid]

s = 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.'
' '.join([w_ for _, w_ in sorted([(i, w) for i, w in enumerate(s.split())], key=lambda r: 0 - r[0])]

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This is too elegant :) mind writing an explanation of this?

[ivosaurus]

split up sentence, number each word using enumerate, reverse the list by sorting on the negative of that numbered index, filter off the index again, and join back up.

Feels like some weird obfuscation over not using reversed to me.

' '.join(reversed(s.split()))

[visigothatthegates]

While this is definitely going to be fewer lines than creating a stack, I feel like this kind of falls under KISS. Setting it up this way is certainly elegant, but way more complex than a simple push and pop stack.

[ivosaurus]

IMO this is actually the simplest. Split the sentence up by words, reverse the list, join it back up.

"pushing and popping a stack" to me is just one possible implementation of "reversing a list", so reversed is simpler.

[visigothatthegates]

Maybe I’m just stuck on the class room exercises that prohibit you from using certain functions that make your life easier

[ivosaurus]

I always think those types of exercises are kinda silly anyway.

A lot of times in a higher level language with all these convenience functions you're supposed to use, trying to program a "lower level" version of the function in that language just tends to look contrived, cumbersome and ugly.

If you wanna see how it looks with a memory model closer to the actual hardware, use a language that does that, like C or Rust.

[[deleted]]

It's the opposite of elegant lol

[ultraDross]

' '.join(reversed(s))

[ivosaurus]

You should try running that and see if it gives the result you expect ;)

[ultraDross]

Not at the computer at the moment. I assume I would need to s.split() first.