Earlier quoted context omitted.
classic blunders of writing a quicksort Actually the classic blunder of writing a quicksort would be writing a quicksort. It's not something you'd normally do in a real code-base. Likewise the classic blunder of these puzzle-tests is that they don't select for the skills that you need to fix real bugs. My first stab at debugging a sort-function would be to write a unit-test. Wonder if any of the candidates did that i…
> My first stab at debugging a sort-function would be to write a unit-test. I applaud your discipline, but I can't help but feel like you're punting at writing code when you say things like this. And the real problem is that unit tests only reflect your expectations. Unless you're familiar with quicksort, you probably won't know what kind of test to write. You'd have to write a very specific dataset: sort(A) ∃ x: A[x…
Bump that to a minute and a half for people that don't do Python, or at least give them a clear assurance that they can assume anything requiring specific Python knowledge is not buggy, and I'd say you're right on, though.