alt Hacker NewsHere's an interesting thought on your "gotcha" - I'm 57 years old, been programming as a career for over 30 years, a lot of languages and I have no idea what the difference is.
Replies
Clubber • 02/20/2025
A function returns a value.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/721090/what-is-the-diffe...
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dennis_jeeves2 • 02/20/2025
I have no idea either. I can easily look it up though. You can often tell an inexperienced interviewer from the extremely domain specific question they ask which _they_ are familiar with.
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ttyprintk • 02/20/2025
It’s ok to say that it’s never professionally mattered. No one has ever been paid to know that. “Are side effects a bad pattern?” Lotsa people have needed to know that on day one.
If I'm applying for a Java position and I claim to have Java experience on my resume, it's perfectly valid for them to ask me the difference between an int, an Integer, and a BigInteger.
But it's certainly not a universal question applicable to all programming languages.
Likewise, Clubber says in their post that their 'gotcha' question doesn't apply to most languages.