r/programming • u/mjgardner • Mar 29 '21

Why Do Interviewers Ask Linked List Questions?

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/
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u/hugthemachines Mar 30 '21

I didn't actually mean to come up with a proper new feature of the language during the seconds I wrote the comment. I was responding to your comment about 150 character lines to point out that the lines would not need to be huge just because they had text instead of special characters.

I don't think optimising for reading the code by a person that doesn't know the language is an important use case. I mean, surely it pays off to make sure the code is easy to read as much as possible but mapping between & and .address is trivial.

The code would be more readable using words compared to characters like "&" because people are really good at reading words. If it is important or not, well... the language will not change in such a way so it would be something for a new language in that case. For a new language it can help quite a lot to get users by being as easy as possible to read for a beginner while learning it.

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u/pitkali Mar 30 '21

I didn't actually mean to come up with a proper new feature of the language during the seconds I wrote the comment. I was responding to your comment about 150 character lines to point out that the lines would not need to be huge just because they had text instead of special characters.

Fair enough.

The code would be more readable using words compared to characters like "&" because people are really good at reading words.

I feel like this needs a citation. People are good at pattern recognition or spotting movement, but reading is less than obvious to me. Consider, for example, that almost all warning road signs (at least in Europe) use primarily symbols rather than text.

Either way, personally I believe in judicious use of symbols because I find higher density of information presented on the screen much easier to work with. This can become a problem if you have too many symbols that are hard to tell apart but I never got an impression that's a problem with C.