Code Reading Question

Tuesday June 16, 2015

Here's an idea for a type of question to help assess a person's skill in programming. Give the person some code to read:

def norf(bar, foo):
    for baz in bar:
        if baz in foo or norf(baz, foo+[baz]):
            return True
    return False

This is four lines of Python.

Some of the questions you could ask:

• What does norf do?
• What are the types of the arguments bar and foo?
• What are better names for norf, bar, foo, and baz?
• What data structure are we working with?
• What are alternatives for the design of this data structure?
• What are limitations of this function?

I suspect that this could be interesting. I haven't seen anyone use interview questions of this type. I wonder how well this one would work.