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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused about this blog post. Python is mostly C inspired but actually more pseudocode inspired (which helps its popularity) which is why chained expressions exist.

Also, why would you conduct an interview in a language where even if you don't know the syntax (and this is obscure) you could have looked it up or disallowed the interview to be done in Python? I think the due diligence with this issue is more to the interviewer than Python.

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> Also, why would you conduct an interview in a language where even if you don't know the syntax (and this is obscure) you could have looked it up or disallowed the interview to be done in Python?

The norm in most of my interviews has been that candidates can solve coding problems in whatever language they are most comfortable with. For most languages like Python etc, it would be a mistake to reject a candidate just because they don't have experience with that specific language.

The norm in most of my interviews has been that candidates can solve coding problems in whatever language they are most comfortable with.

I assume they've already filtered out candidates whose "most comfortable language" isn't the one they're hiring for, or they're going to have a difficult time when they come across the one who wants to use APL or x86 Asm.

I always interview for generalist jobs in python, but most jobs I’ve done use other languages.

I heard a tale of a candidate white boarding in an obscure language (in a bit of an attempt to hide a deficiency), unfortunately for the candidate the interviewer happened to be well versed in the language and saw right through the charade.

Hah. Even if the interviewer didn't see through the charade they have plenty of time to check the code after the fact. Once or twice a candidate has done something I didn't know about so I just googled it. Nice little learning opportunity for me.

Mate, let's be honest, we've all been in interviews where the interviewer had a serious misunderstanding of the language the job was supposedly using, let alone some other language.

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