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Comment by throwyawayyyy | Hacker News Reader

Random, but I interviewed at Knight Capital for a software engineering position a few weeks before this all went down. I was in London, so the interview was done over the phone. Picture me in the evening, handwriting C to solve some problem (the fog of time too thick to remember what that problem was), then reading out what I'd written, semicolons and all, to the interviewer. Because of course there was no shared doc. I did very badly. But then, so did they.

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> handwriting C /…/ reading out what I'd written, semicolons and all, to the interviewer.

I had to re-read it to make sure you are not joking. The fact that you were not made me laugh harder.

I'm now just saying "retuuurn" in various exaggerated accents.

I'm picturing them arguing vigorously over what character the word "bracket" specifies in American versus British English.

Are brackets different in American English? I'd say the Queen should order a second burning down of Washington but, the way things are going, the locals will probably get to it soon.

parens: ()

brackets: []

braces:{}

Versus:

brackets: ()

square brackets: []

curly brackets: {}

Still drives me less mad than "inverted commas" though.

But don’t many (most?) US programmers call () parentheses? I assume non-programmers in the US call them brackets?

1.9M results: lisp "parentheses" -brackets

800k results: lisp "brackets" -parentheses

I admit result counts are more similar if lisp is replaced with “python” or “golang”, but square brackets come up more often for those languages.

Disclaimer: I am searching from google.co.nz, and I presume search result counts are not a great proxy measurement for actual usage!

No. Most US non-programmers call () parentheses, not brackets.

In my lifetime, “parentheses” has been the canonical way to refer to () in the US. “Brackets” is an umbrella term that can describe one or all of (), {}, and [].

If you’re in a context where only one of the bracket types would normally be used, you can just call them “brackets.” Since many people never really use [] and {}, “brackets” casually refers to ().

To disambiguate, you can call () “open brackets”, [] “square brackets”, and {} “curly brackets.”

And for the cherry on top, {} can be called “curly braces.” That’s my preferred term for them. But it’s awkward to call [] “square braces” and () “open braces” :)

I've always called the curly ones brackets and the square ones braces.

> Since many people never really use [] and {}, “brackets” casually refers to ().

I have never heard anyone call () "brackets". Is it more regional than just the US maybe?

Same. I've seen {} and [] both called braces and brackets, though usually in that respective order. The ambiguity is precisely why they are also called curly braces and square brackets. The double naming is more concrete.

I've never seen or heard any programmer call () brackets or braces. It's always parentheses. I may have heard a math or science teacher call them all brackets or braces, however, since they are synonymous there outside of odd exceptions like interval notation.

Fascinating! While I’ve definitely heard “brackets” used in the midwest occasionally, “parenthesis” is the standard term by far.

British English here: "(" is "open bracket" and ")" is "close bracket".

Together they are just brackets, not open brackets.

As someone who has lived on the West Coast of the US for decades, I have never heard any American call (), brackets.

Chiming in as someone who has lived decades in both South East US and North East US. I've also never heard () called "brackets" only "parentheses". This includes in and out of programming circles.

I assumed the comment saying "parens: ()" was talking about US, but the replies seem to be interpreting the opposite.

Never? You guys don't use the BEDMAS acronym in grade school for teaching order of operations?

I've only ever called them brackets.

> BEDMAS

Was PEMDAS for us.

> You guys don't use the BEDMAS acronym in grade school for teaching order of operations?

No, didn't use any acronym for that in grade school, and when I did encounter one used in grade schools, it was PEMDAS, not BEDMAS.

BODMAS for us...

BODMAS for me too, although the "O" always confused me, the "E" standing for "exponent" always made more sense to me than the O" standing for "[to the power] of"

Yeah, never. PEMDAS for sure. What part of the country were you in where you got BEDMAS?

FWIW, I did my schooling on the West coast of British Columbia in the early 90's and it was BEDMAS.

BEDMAS in Canada (Southern Ontario) circa 2000.

Here is what Clang uses: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/589b9df4e15131348b...

parens: ()

squares: []

braces: {}

basically a mixed of British and American English

There seems to be some confusion. I am saying the top is American - at least as I was taught it in school. The bottom is the more typically British variant. But I think the reality is the both America and Britain have variations. To an American ear, bracket to mean parenthesis is not just odd, but wrong. But someone already said they consider bracket to be a catchall term, so obviously this is not universal.

Edit: okay, apparently there is just complete bracket anarchy across America and words have no fixed meaning.

One difference is that we don’t have “round brackets” over here, only parentheses.

(We do have “square brackets” however.)

I've heard "lumala" or so but most people just say "paren."

People who say paren are monsters.

brackets are for squares.

Peace, man!

squares are for brackets.

I believed it. Amazon tried to make me do the same thing. I stopped the interview.

I also interviewed at knight a few weeks before everything blew up, didn’t go well, interviewer was one of those guys who finally got to hire someone and figured now it’s his turn to be a jerk. Really smug and arrogant. When I heard how badly things had gone it did bring a smile to my face knowing somewhere that guy was having a Sunday dinner sized serving of humble pie.

Same! Although I interviewed in person in their NYC office. I was very junior at the time and the team I interviewed with was awesome. I (luckily) didn't get the job. I did a few more interviews and accepted an offer from another company where I met my wife!

Do you return the wife when you leave the job?

In all seriousness, you dodged a bullet. Do you remember what problem or set of problems they asked you to solve?

Also, what made the interviewing team awesome in your opinion?

The interview was incredibly basic compared to modern FANG style full day interviews. The coding portion was basically a fizzbuzz question. They had a one page printout of a Java method and I needed to give the output. I answered it correctly nearly immediately as it was simply testing pass by reference vs pass by value. The main interview was all verbal q&a core java questions.

> and accepted an offer from another company where I met my wife!

That really cheered me up this morning, I met my wife at work as well.

I may well be dense, because I am just not seeing why email would not have been a viable option for sharing code..

Before all these code sharing sites were popular, that's how all the phone screens were done. I had to write my code on paper and dictate on phone. this was before 2011-2012

Did they not have email in 2011? Seems really difficult to dictate code

> I did very badly. But then, so did they.

Thank you for sharing, this started of my day very well, had a hearty chuckle.

this is hilarious, apparently someone on their end thought it was an acceptable interview format, thanks for sharing.

If Yegge's blog is to be believed this is exactly how they used to do it at Amazon too, many moons ago. I think this just used to be common practice. Before my time though.

I would have started them off with a couple of preprocessor macros.

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