So this leads me to this scenario and a question, your manager has asked you to be part of the interview process for a new programmer position that involves Perl and he wants you to make sure this person knows their Perl.
What does "knows their Perl" mean? How fluent do they have to be? Does the candidate have to be Damian-level?
I'm more interested in making sure that the candidate's level of expertise matches what she claims on the resume. I also want to know what sorts of code she's worked on. There's no "you have to score 80% on this or you fail," but I do want to know if the test matches what the person says, to weed out the people who put "Perl" on the resume but really have only hacked up some Matt's Script Archive code.
To that end, I print out the following on a sheet of paper and have the candidate fill it out. My notes on each question follow.
NAME
Perl Questions - Please fill in the answers below, or the back of the
page if necessary.
What is the meaning of each of these special variables?
* $_ (If they don't know $_, they haven't done much data mangling at least)
* $! (Don't know it? Haven't reported many errors.)
* $& (Almost no one gets this, which is fine)
* $1 (Don't know it? Not doing much regex work.)
* @ISA (Better know this if you claim object knowledge)
What's this code doing?
while (<>) {
s/\s+$//;
s/^\s+//;
print if length;
}
(This is pretty trivial. If someone doesn't understand, I'm very wary.)
Definitions Explain what each of these is.
* The Camel (Where's the background from?)
* CPAN (Don't know what CPAN is, I'm scared)
* POD (Some people don't like the docs, alas)
* "my" vs. "our" vs. "local" (Many people say "I only ever use my", which is an OK answer w/me)
Code: Unique array elements
You have an array @array. Print the unique elements.
(This exists for one reason: Do they know to use a hash)Code: File deleter
Write a program that deletes all the files specified on the command
line.
(This is sort of a throwaway. I'm mostly interested if they know it's unlink, not delete)
xoxo, Andy
-- Andy Lester => [EMAIL PROTECTED] => www.petdance.com => AIM:petdance
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