Comment by Xoros | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xoros | Hacker News Reader

Those white board stuff reminds me when I was a CS student in the beginning of the 90's in France.

We had our exams on paper. And believe me, writing LISP on paper, knowing if you forgot one parenthesis you got 0 point ("if I type it on a computer, it fails !"), was pretty and unnecessary stressful.

So I relate with candidate facing that. Dude, on your day to day work, you WILL have a computer to check those !

How can you decently check those skill on a white board ? I totally agree with what's stated in this post.

If you think writing lisp by hand is bad, try implementing a linked list interface in java on paper... shudder. (in fairness, we were sanely graded, minor syntax errors didn't subtract terribly from the grade...).

Writing code for tests, on paper, has been a thing in CS for quite awhile. While writing lisp for tests, I used to sometimes write the code with no parens (using indentation to denote nesting). Then I'd go back and add parens where appropriate.

    defun add-pos-only v1 v2
        let sum 0
            if and > v1 0
                   > v2 0
                + v1 v2
                nil

No good interviewer is grading whiteboard coding on whether you forgot a parenthesis or semicolon.

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