[COFF] [TUHS] Interview question
Larry McVoy
lm at mcvoy.com
Tue Jan 3 12:58:36 AEST 2023
On Mon, Jan 02, 2023 at 02:13:45PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
>
>
> > On Jan 2, 2023, at 1:36 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > The /bin/sh stuff made me think of an interview question I had for engineers,
> > that a surprisingly few could pass:
> >
> > "Tell me about something you wrote that was entirely you, the docs, the
> > tests, the source, the installer, everything. It doesn't have to be a
> > big thing, but it has to have been successfully used by at least 10
> > people who had no contact with you (other than to say thanks)."
> >
> > Most people fail this. I think the people who pass might look
> > positively on the v7 sh stuff. But who knows?
>
> Huh. That is a surprisingly tricky question, depending on how you want to construe "entirely you".
>
> Which of these, if any, do you count?
Any of them that are entirely done by you. Here's an example. I posted
move.c and copy.c to comp.sources.unix as an undergrad, a newbie. They
let you do stuff like
move =.c =.C++
and the = was the wild card. .* in regexp. They were a little better
than that because you could have more than one = and could expand with
something like \=2 \=1 (it's been 40 years, I might have the details
wrong, still have the source, can post). Just did
http://mcvoy.com/lm/move.shar
I know people used it because later in life it got mentioned. But
literally noone ever asked me how to use it or install or anything.
It's a tiny thing but it meets what I was looking for.
Entirely you means entirely you. If you have done that, you are in
a pretty small crowd.
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
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