I first heard about FizzBuzz from Hackruiter.com and then I got an email from RapLeaf (http://blog.rapleaf.com/dev/2011/09/06/code-golfing-at-the-o...)

It's a very interesting concept to filter out the bad programmers using something simple like FizzBuzz. What do you guys like to give out as programming or interview questions? How effective are they?

I believe FizzBuzz was first brought to attention by Jeff Atwood in his Coding Horror blog http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/fizzbuzz-the-progra....

When interviewing, we'll generally ask questions about data structures and class design (design a card game), very basic looping and guards (do FizzBuzz), iterative vs. recursive programming (implement Fibonacci using both), and sometimes we will throw some discrete math problems in there too. These questions, coupled with making a strong effort to really get to know the candidate (is this someone you want to spend a lot of time with?) can really help for effective hiring.

the shortest I could do is 72 characters in PHP. I have no idea how they can do 56.

    <? while(++$i<101)echo $i%15?$i%5?$i%3?$i:'Fizz':'Buzz':'FizzBuzz',"\n";

Don't think you can do $i%15, still need to do that check separately. I like how you can leave out the closing ?>. you can also save 2 spaces by getting rid of whitespace between statements and symbols .

The comments on the RapLeaf blog post I linked to in this thread has a guy trying out different Ruby solutions. Very clever!

That code produces correct output. It passed.

PHP does not require a closing ?>

Ohhh. I was thinking about it wrong. Probably obvious to others, but I forgot about the property that if you have primes p and q, any number n (evenly) divisible by p that is also divisible by q must be divisible by the product of p*q.

That shortcut is a result of hyper-optimization and I was thinking more along the lines of code-reusability (e.g. if the rules of FizzBuzz were changed from %3 and %5 to %x and %y) =P

I only worked on it for a few minutes and got 114 chars in Python

  for i in range(1,101):
   if i%15==0:print'FizzBuzz'
   elif i%3==0:print'Fizz'
   elif i%5==0:print'Buzz'
   else:print i

Now I am on the hunt to figure out how to do it in 56, there goes my afternoon.

Heh, shortest I could do in Python after several hours was 62

  for x in range(1,101):print'Fizz'*(x%3==0)+'Buzz'*(x%5==0)or x

Off by 6 bytes!