The book The World's Great Speeches is a collection of most profound orations in history. The speeches were delivered in miscellaneous languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Russian and please correct me if I missed any), nevertheless reading their English translations we admire them all the same. This leads to an observation, that although delivering great speeches requires a decent command of a particular spoken language, the crux of a great speeches lies elsewhere. Great speaker has to invent powerful metaphors, control the dynamics, build the mood. Speakers who neglect these aspects end up being eloquent bores, you'd better run if you meet one at a party.
Similarly, delivering great software requires much more than a decent command of a programming language. Good software developer has to envision boundary cases, predict extreme or erroneous conditions, design the code for scalability. You can hardly be a great programmer without a good command of some programming language, but mastering a programming language does not automatically make you a great programmer.
By design, Codility leaves the choice of programming language to the assessed candidate (currently the choice covers C, C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP and Pascal). We provide an option to make selected languages unavailable. It should follow from your recruitment policy whether you restrict available programming languages, just bear in mind that great speakers like Pericles, Socrates or Demosthenes would not impress you if you insist they deliver a speech in English.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Programming languages
The book The World's Great Speeches is a collection of most profound orations in history. The speeches were delivered in miscellaneous languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Russian and please correct me if I missed any), nevertheless reading their English translations we admire them all the same. This leads to an observation, that although delivering great speeches requires a decent command of a particular spoken language, the crux of a great speeches lies elsewhere. Great speaker has to invent powerful metaphors, control the dynamics, build the mood. Speakers who neglect these aspects end up being eloquent bores, you'd better run if you meet one at a party.
Similarly, delivering great software requires much more than a decent command of a programming language. Good software developer has to envision boundary cases, predict extreme or erroneous conditions, design the code for scalability. You can hardly be a great programmer without a good command of some programming language, but mastering a programming language does not automatically make you a great programmer.
By design, Codility leaves the choice of programming language to the assessed candidate (currently the choice covers C, C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP and Pascal). We provide an option to make selected languages unavailable. It should follow from your recruitment policy whether you restrict available programming languages, just bear in mind that great speakers like Pericles, Socrates or Demosthenes would not impress you if you insist they deliver a speech in English.
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