undefined | Better HN

0 pointsonemoreact14y ago0 comments

Did you expect people to be able to do this by hand? I mean infront of an IDE I could do this in 5-10 minutes. But on a blackboard or pen and paper there is little chance I would get anywhere close to a correct answer.

0 comments

kragen14y ago

I don't understand how that's possible. I mean, I'm going to assume that you're telling the truth, but I don't understand how it's possible for that knowledge to reside so entirely in your IDE rather than in your head. Do you mean you know that you would use an Enumeration, but not the names of the Enumeration and Hashtable methods that you would use? If you're trying to debug a piece of code and it's calling the wrong methods on an Enumeration or a Hashtable, how do you tell that they're the wrong methods? How does this work?

onemoreactOP14y ago

I have use a lot of diffrent programming languages. I have trouble seperating what you can in theory do with a hashmap from what a given implementaiton let's you do with a hashmap. I have also engraned typing code out to the point where a lot of basic syntax features quickly become automatic I might think EOL but I type ;<carriage return>

The best way I can discribe it is like singing. You can have trouble speaking the words to something that you can sing without difficulty.

cousin_it14y ago

I think onemoreact meant that after relying on a good IDE for awhile you can easily forget whether the method is named table.keys() or table.getKeys(), hasElements() or hasMoreElements(), stuff like that. Forgetting such things doesn't impair your ability to understand or debug the code.

nitrogen14y ago

Java's idiosyncratic interfaces don't always help either: there's Enumeration which has nextElement() and hasMoreElements(), and there's Iterator which has next() and hasNext().

arethuza14y ago

This was the last question out of 15 or so that we used to give to people as part of an interview if they claimed they had done Java before - it was a written test. Some people had only done C or C++ before and had only had a quick look at Java and still did pretty well in it.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse