For me, a good interview is a dialogue where the company representative shows me as much about the company as I do about me as a candidate. Take-home tasks are okay, I guess, but I suspect they might balk at me requesting they handle a mock HR issue, or whatever, for me!

Yeah, that’s my reading as well.

If you’re optimizing that hard you should probably sort the data first anyway, but yeah, sometimes it’s absolutely called for. Not that I’ve actually needed that in my professional career, but then again I’ve never worked close enough to metal for it to actually matter.

That said, all of these are implemented as functions, so they’re already costing the function call anyway…

This is why I think school and interviews are like a whole different universe from the one where actual work gets done.

I used to do a lot of work in vim, over SSH. Five PuTTY windows, one of which was always showing cmatrix

Shared an office with a Business Analyst, so he was way more impressed with my “matrixing”, than I was with his “spreadsheeting”.

I use tabs because I prefer 4-space indents and others might prefer 2-space indentation or the gross and unacceptable 6-space indentation.

If more than one person is working on a code base, there will likely be more than one preference, and with tabs everyone gets to just set their own tab width.

Yes, even the 3-space savages.