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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

    Programming languages known: 
    
    C/C++, HTML

This is usually a good sign that this person can probably complete these exercises:

Write a program which display a number between 10 to 100 randomly.

Write a program which accept a letter and display it in uppercase letter.

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> Write a program which accepts a letter and display it in uppercase

That task is a lot harder than it sounds, given that casing is locale-specific. In a Turkish locale for example, I would expect a lowercase "i" to be converted to U+0130 "İ" instead of "I" like in en-US.

And then there's the whole ambiguity around the word "letter". Is a letter a single code point, or a grapheme cluster? What if someone passes in an emoji? With multiple zero-width joiners? Better make sure your dependencies are up to date so you know what's a single letter and what's too many...

This is clearly not what GP meant, and although i18n is rather complicated, I suspect that pointing all these things out to a junior dev in an interview would actually cause them to BSOD. The only correct answer to that question if you take i18n into account is "I'm not qualified to write that off the top of my head."

The answer is clearly text-transform: uppercase, given the poster knows HTML (which more or less implies CSS)

Haha, that's largely my resume, but I write pretty hardcore high-performance multithreaded code in C++ every day. Reason: I started with C++, got a job in it, and still work in it 15 years later, having mostly not needed another language in my day job.

To be fair, I also write some Lua, Javascript, Python, and I have sideline love affairs with Rust, Zig, Scheme, Common Lisp and others. But I've never had to write serious software in any of these, so applying for jobs where that's the main language would at least require me to honestly say "it'll take a little while before I reach maximum productivity".

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