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I think we, engineers, can help HR folks ask important questions that would prevent bad candidates from wasting our time as well as thinking up crazy ideas that could help lure good candidates.

Yesterday, I suggested going EA-style and hand out laptop stickers on an upcoming hacker-ish convention with things like

  ''.join([chr(c) for c in [119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103]])
and

  (dolist (x (mapcar #'code-char '(119 101 39 114 101 32 104 105 114 105 110 103))) (princ x))
I am somewhat unsure about the Lisp thing, so I asked it to be passed through a real lisper before hitting the printer.



  (format t "~{~c~}" 
    (mapcar #'code-char 
       '(119 101 39 114 101 32 104 105 114 105 110 103)))

  => we're hiring
FORMAT is a turing complete DSL for formatting output; here you see ~{~} iteration directive.


http://marcoil.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/format-fear.jp...


C'mon:

    (map 'string #'code-char '(119 ...))


Seems like we're seeing less of

perl -e "@w = (119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103); foreach $c (@w) {print chr $c;}"

these days.


Hopefully that's because a good Perl hacker would write:

    perl -E 'say map { chr } 119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103'


perl -e "print map {chr} 119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103;"

is the best my version can do. I still need to read more of that book of yours. And update my install: neither say nor -E exist.


You need at least Perl 5.10 (and 5.12.3 should be out shortly). If your OS vendor has an older version installed, see App::perlbrew to install your own updated version independent of the system Perl 5.


Indeed. I don't think we have any actively maintained code written in Perl. I know a lot of plumbing written in it, but it's not in need of new features.


Sounds like it was written by a good Perl hacker if it still just works and nobody has needed to maintain it after all this time.


perl -e 'print pack("c*", 119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103)'




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