[RC Diary] Interview mock, helping a recurser figuring out how to code her ideas (-74)

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[RC Diary] Interview mock, helping a recurser figuring out how to code her ideas (-74)

Helped recurser

It wasn't that easy because I had to remain concentrated all the time, to avoid saying wrong things to her.

I found this to be a really good exercise, we went from best practices for the frontend to the ones for the backend passing through session handling and how to perform calls to a third service that requires OAuth for certain calls.

Really good stuff!

Balanced parens problem

These are some balanced inputs

()(())() 
()
((()()))

while these are unbalanced

(
())
(() ()))

The function should output false if the set of parens, passed in as string, are unbalanced, true if balanced.

This is the solution

Array.prototype.pop = Array.prototype.shift
Array.prototype.push = Array.prototype.unshift

let balanced = code => {
  let parenthesis = code.split(''),
      stack = [parenthesis.pop()]

  parenthesis.forEach((current) => {
    let top = stack.pop()
    if (!top) {
      stack.push(current)
    } else if (top !== '(' || current !== ')') {
      stack.push(top)
      stack.push(current)
    }
  })
  return stack
}

Choosing paper

I went through the references section of both papers and took thoe titles that tickled my interest.

From "out of the tar pit"

I got these:

• Monads for functional programming
• Algorithm = logic + control
• Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs
• Equal Rights for Functional Objects or, The More Things Change, The More They Are the Same
• No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accidence in Software Engineering

From "why functional programming matters"

I got these

• The semantic elegance of applicative languages
• An Overview of Miranda

I think I will read both last ones. They seem interesting enough.

Mock interviews

My problem was quite straightforward:

Given some code print only the sections that are not commented out by multi line /* */ comments

But I still forgot to apply "wishful programming", and come up with a clean pseudocode, mine actually looked like wrong JavaScript. I should get better at time management I think, that would allow me to understand that I still have time to write things cleanly, without rushing from one concept to the next.