Should we hire someone who writes C in Perl? [closed]

Answer 1

Code looks clean and readable. For that size, it does not require that much comments (perhaps none at all.) It's not just about good comments, but also good code, and the later is more important than the former.

If we were looking at a more complex/larger piece of code, I would say that comments are needed. But for that (specially the way it was written - well written), I don't think so.

I think it is unfair and vain to put doubt on the applicant given the piece of code submitted by him/her is quite acceptable and did the job.

Answer 2

I wouldn't accept the candidate. He or she isn't comfortable with Perl's idioms, which will result in suboptimal code, less work efficieny (all those unnecessary lines have to be written!) and a inablilty to read code written by an experienced Perl coder (who of course uses regexes etc. at large).

But it works...

Answer 3

I would argue writing C in Perl is a much better situation than writing Perl in C. As is often brought up on the SO podcast, understanding C is a virtue that not all developers (even some good ones) have nowadays. Hire them and buy a copy of Perl Best Practices for them and you will be set. After best practices a copy of Intermediate Perl and they could work out.

Answer 4

I have to (sort of) disagree with most views expressed here.

Since the code in question could be expressed much more compact and maintainable in idiomatic Perl, you really need to pose the question how much time the candidate spend developing this solution and how much time would have been spent by someone halfway proficient using idiomatic Perl.

I think you'll find that this coding style may be a huge waste of time (and thus the company's money).

I don't argue that every Perl programmer needs to grok the language – that, unfortunately, would be far-fetched – but they should know enough to not spend ages re-implementing core language features in their code over and over again.

EDIT Looking at the code again, I've got to be more drastic: although the code looks very clean, it's actually horrible. Sorry. This isn't Perl. Do you know the saying “you can program Fortran in any language”? Yes, you can. But you shouldn't.

Answer 5

Maybe ask him to write more versions of the same code? When in doubt about hiring, ask more questions to candidate.

Answer 6

No use strict/use warnings, systematic use of substr instead of regexp, no use of modules. This is definitely not someone who has "very good Perl experience". At least not for real-life Perl projects. Like you, I suspect that it's probably a C programmer with a basic knowledge of Perl.

That doesn't mean that they can't learn, especially as there are other Perl people around. It does seem to mean that they overstated their qualification for the job though. A few more questions about how exactly they acquired that very good Perl experience would be in order.