Python Interview Questions

[Tim Chase]

On 07/09/12 01:39, yeryomin.igor at gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, 30 October 2007 21:24:04 UTC+2, Tim Chase  wrote:

yes, yes I did, almost 5 years ago. :-)

You didn't include any questions/comments on my email, so it's a bit
hard to respond.

>> While I haven't interviewed precisely for Python, I've been
>> on the other (interviewing) end and can offer a few of the
>> sorts of things I ask. 
[snip]
>> Python History:
>> ===============
>> - decorators added in which version?
>>
>> - "batteries included" SQL-capible DB in which version?

I've long wanted to update my original post in this department to
include things like the "with" statement as well as my reasoning.
Some of our deployments were stuck on earlier versions (currently
our oldest is a 2.4 deployment that is merrily chugging along,
somewhat stuck due to an external binary dependency for which terms
changed between versions).  At the time I wrote that, we had some
2.2 and 2.3 code in production that couldn't use decorators, and
sqlite wasn't officially added until 2.5 (IIRC).   Now that
everything is at least 2.4, code can now use decorators freely.

I'd also likely include questions about integer division and other
stuff added in 3.x (such as the default new-class behavior).

So my main motivation was to make sure applicants knew that, in some
of our environments, certain features might not be available.  Not
that I wanted to hire a Python historian.

>> Other Process-releated things:
>> ==============================
>> - do they use revision control
>>    (RCS/CVS/Subversion/Mercurial/Git...anything but VSS) and
>>    know how to use it well
>>
>> - do they write automated tests for their code

Don't let the importance of these two escape.  It's SOOOOOOO easy to
grab any of the freely available VCS tools and learn the ropes, or
to write some test code.  Failure to do so just seems like
negligence these days.

-tkc