Fizzbuzz, Interviews, And Overthinking

I understood from near the very beginning that this wasn't really about Fizzbuzz. All the way through the post, I was waiting for the author to get a real world example instead of Fizzbuzz. Yet, I got to the end of the post and realized it was already pretty long.

I think in talking about programming, we are often hindered by the fact that it is much more complicated than our brains can handle. Our only choices are to write novel length treatments of real programs or short story length posts about a toy program, or just the tiniest piece of a real program.

Which is all to say, as sick of hearing about Fizzbuzz as I am, I'm glad there are silly little examples like it that we all know. Even though it was ostensibly about interviewing, that was a much clearer introduction to monoids than most. I think it was largely because it was in reference to Fizzbuzz: something very concrete with which we're all familiar.

Too many introductions to Haskell's abstractions are too abstract. Good on the author for finding away around that.

I agree that Fizzbuzz can be a more interesting example of how to write code without repetition. While the author suggests that languages such as Haskell provide a unique advantage, the deciding question seems to be the availability of pre-built abstractions. Consider the following solution in Python:

  for i in xrange(1,101): print (('' if i%3 else 'Fizz')+('' if i%5 else 'Buzz')) or i

or the even more general:

  mapping={3:'Fizz',5:'Buzz'}
  for i in xrange(1,101): 
    print ''.join(['' if i%x else mapping[x] for x in mapping]) or i

We can even do this in C though to write something as extensible as the second would require writing more helper functions than I can justify for this brief comment:

  #include
  #include
  int main(){
    int i;
    char s[4];
    char n[3];
    for (i=1;i