Bonkers

[Nigel Rantor]

David Cantrell wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 10:02:47AM +0100, Pete Sergeant wrote:
>> On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 03:41:17PM +0100, Nigel Rantor wrote:
>>> So, we tag team interviews, one of my colleagues questions is
>>> basically a stack vs heap questino to figure out if they understand
>>> where stuff goes.
>> Why would a Perl programmer be familiar with the concepts of 'stack' and
>> 'heap'? You could come up with some slightly-off analogy involving
>> scope, but stil...
> 
> Someone who only knows perl is going to be a poor programmer, and
> knowing at least *some* C helps a lot.  However, there are plenty of
> tolerable C programmers who don't know about stack vs heap.  They don't
> need to know, that's the whole point of a compiler, it hides all that
> mess from the user.

Well, hmm...maybe...but it does still give you information about their 
depth of knowledge, if they realise the difference between stack/heap 
and what goes on the stack they're also likely to understand, for 
example, why passing a char* rather than a char[1024] is likely to be 
more efficient.

It also weeds out those people who can't say "I don't know", which I 
find to be a very handy skill in developers[0].

   n

[0] Well, okay, everyone, but I find it more annoying in developers who 
try and blag it and make stupid mistakes becasue they think a guess is 
"good enough" when on the job.