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From: finnegan@dhw68k.cts.com (Greg Finnegan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: The programming CULT
Message-ID: <1990Aug13.043430.4662@dhw68k.cts.com>
Date: 13 Aug 90 04:34:30 GMT
References: <1990Aug6.174543.27956@midway.uchicago.edu> <56406@microsoft.UUCP>
Reply-To: finnegan@dhw68k.cts.com (Greg Finnegan)
Organization: Wolfskill & Dowling residence; Anaheim, CA (USA)
Lines: 30

>Knowing when to use the proper data
>structure is more useful than knowing that a certain sequence of
>instructions saves 2 machine cycles for some operation.  
>
>James Thiele -- microsoft!jamesth

This is not meant as a slam towards you or your employer (well, maybe
at one time it might have been against your employer :-).  I think this
is an odd position considering that my entire interview process at
Microsoft consisted of little tests (like how to save 2 cycles).  My
favorite (that I couldn't sovle without prompting from my interviewer)
was how to count the number of bytes in a word (knee-jerk response was
for i = 1 to n coutem; -- the correct [um, optimized] answer is some
sort of AND and XOR or ROTx combination which I can never remember
unless I sit down and figure it out all over again). Not once was
I asked a question about how I might approach a difficult programming
problem (or the methods/algorithms I had used on previous projects). 

Alas, we decided that there were too many diffences in our philosophies
(read: I could not stomach the fact that I would have to do s/w dev.
on a 386 for the Mac)

Greg.


-- 
----------------------------------------------------------
Greg Finnegan          "It worked just fine on my machine"

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