At least in my experience, the main point of coding interviews has always been to expose and analyze the way that you approach and solve problems, not to see how fast you write code. It's usually better to take a step back and re-evaluate the design of your solution rather than dive into the first solution you create, since you'll usually find a better way to express the solution that is short enough to write down on the whiteboard without pressing against the time constraints.
It's also important to see how reliant people are on their tools.
This was accessible and interesting, thanks for the link.
A few questions:
1. Does the overhead of creating a new CLH every time a Haskell function is invoked from C introduce any performance concerns(speed didn't seem to be well-covered in section 6)?
2. How should Table 5 be interpreted? Is the main goal to show that B5 and B6 do not use the garbage collector if it's unnecessary for the task? Not sure I understand how the event-driven mutator fits into the situation.
I think both this, the parent comment, and a fair amount of other comments on this post are unnecessarily harsh towards the designers. Pointing out design issues is always helpful for improvement and reiteration, but attacking their motivations just makes everyone hostile and gets nothing accomplished.
Reading through this I see I was wrong. Thank you.
My reaction was provoked when I was considering paying for the rest of the questions, saw the comments and saw the link to all of them. I was too hasty in my response.
If I pay to get all the questions only to learn later that I could have accessed them all easily for free, I'm going to feel ripped off, even if it was only $5. Either make sure the questions are blocked off properly or let everyone have access to all of the questions. You can't have it both ways here.
I see the point you're making here, but I feel like the motivations you're pointing at for why people post on discussion groups and forums isn't correct in most cases. At least in my experience, people tend to post helpful advice because helping people out feels good. It also provides an ego boost when people view you as an expert at something.
It's also important to see how reliant people are on their tools.