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Comment by drakenot

I think memorization tests of the sort that ask what FunctionX you should use from LibraryY for a particular situation are terrible.

I don't consider asking a developer about basic data structures and their properties as terrible. This is foundational knowledge that is useful for nearly every programming job. Knowing about lists, hash tables, trees, etc and their operations or tradeoffs is extremely important.

Similarly, having a developer that can reason about the runtime and memory complexity of the code they write is important as well.

These are the "lingua franca" things that I was speaking about in my previous post. Even if particular developers think that the above things aren't useful to them, I would argue that they are probably wrong and just don't know how or why they are.

parent drakenot 10 years ago

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