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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

What does this mean? The article also states they ask other questions in which the candidate can respond in any language of their choice.

The language isn't important here, it's knowing the algorithm and being able to put your ideas into code.

You could ask the same exact question in Java and you should be able to get the same answer from people.

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The language is absolutely important, since in haskell I could just:

    > reverse [1,2,3,4]

or if I couldn't use the Prelude (yikes!)

    reverse [x] = [x]

    reverse (x:xs) = reverse xs ++ [x]

    > reverse [1,2,3,4]

The problem is that linked list traversal is a solved problem. Why not throw a novel and interesting problem at candidates? That way you could gain some insight into how they go about solving problems instead of how good the candidate is at memorizing other people's solutions that they could just as easily look up in a search engine in a few minutes.

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