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Comment by masukomi | Hacker News Reader

just because 15 HAPPENS to be a concatenation of the output of 3 and the output of 5 today doesn't mean it will be tomorrow. If I said "say Fizz for multiples of 3, Buzz for multiples of 5, and 'this is a silly coding problem' for multiples of 3 and 5 then you'd have to rewrite your code.

Some of us know that clients ALWAYS change their minds, specs are rarely equivalent to the end result, and code against future changes that are trivial to account for in advance.

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For any implementation you can manufacture an example which will require a person to re-structure their code.

Additionally, using %15 is not DRY. If the spec changes from saying "Fizz" on multiples of 3 to saying "Fizz" on multiples of 4, then you will have to also update 15->20. If you forget to do this, you have a bug.

The correct implementation is dependent on the problem's context, and such context is not available with the FizzBuzz problem.

Part of my point (which i obviosuly didn't communicate well) is that Fizz concatenated with Buzz is a premature optimization. It's the developer taking advantage of a linguistic coincience. The instructions are to output 3 different strings based on %3, %5, or %3 and %5. I have never seen a set of fizzbuzz instructions that actually specified that the last option should be a concatenation of the 1st two. It's always specified as a 3rd string that people independently notice is a concatenation of the two.

If you're using something like JS, where strings are truthy, you can always do something like this...

https://gist.github.com/tracker1/d58fa1f83ab17d37eb2c

This is absolutely true for real-world coding. However, for the purposes of an exercise, I think the fact that 15 was chosen was not an accident, but is part of the exercise. Does the coder recognize the relationship between the multiples, and recognize the ability to optimize by removing an extraneous comparison?

It's kind of a trivial test for that sort of recognition, but anything as small as FizzBuzz is going to be rather trivial.

As with most of these little tests, the actual question is, "Can you explain your decision, and does your explanation make sense?"

Really, the FizzBuzz test is a check to see if someone is bullshitting when they say they can code. Testing deeper than that is expecting too much of it.

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