Reddit reviews Exercises in Programming Style

Oh, I missed that there was a book. Here it is for my fellow sleepy heads:

Exercises in Programming Style by Cristina Videira Lopes

Prof. C.V. Lopes, the Editor in Chief, has published Exercises in Programming Style, a very interesting book that is seems pragmatic and focused on details of practice.

However, browsing the contents of the first two issues of this new journal, I don't see anything with that flavor. The topics all seem to me academic in tone and focused on minutia and arcana.

For comparison see the topics in the journal "Software: Practice and Experience" -- which of course is not at all free and open like ASEP.

My advice is to stick to Python for now, and work through the book Exercises in Programming Style https://www.amazon.com/dp/1482227371/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_JHj3Db3Q6F3GM functional programming section.

After that, you can move to Clojure or Haskell.

I've actually been reading Exercises in Programming Style and enjoying it quite a lot.

Book's Website:

http://tagide.com/EPSBook/

Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Exercises-Programming-Style-Cristina-Videira/dp/1482227371

Code:

https://github.com/crista/exercises-in-programming-style

I haven’t read it because I have no time and 2 young children, but I badly want to read exercises in programming style

> Whether intended or not, this communicates they must matter, or else why ask for them?

They are not being asked for. They are being mentioned, because it's presumed that there will be questions about them, but they are not being asked for.

> The way you get more clear about those things not mattering is by telling the applicants not to implement them.

"Make any simplifying assumptions you need to" means "don't implement anything you don't want to or don't have time to".

> Some vague statement about how the applicant should implement them if they have time is the opposite of saying they don't matter.

It doesn't say "you should implement them if you have time". It says "feel free to implement whatever you want to implement".

> Is it possible that a) your team hasn't done many of them as part of job applications and b) your existing developers did not implement the assignment before giving it to applicants?

Based on the git repo, this has been a thing for about a year. The company is in a period of rapid hiring, and many of the developers working here would have done this exercise. As for b), we actually have a weekly session to discuss different ways of implementing this particular exercise using this book which consists of nothing except that exercise implemented in different ways. I'm pretty sure this session started first, and the coding assignment came after.