I completely agree with the general assessment, but then there are always pesky exceptions. In this case the list entered a JavaScript frontend from the yaml header of machine generated content pages for the website framework Hugo. And, of course, after finding the bug, it is clear that things could have been done differently and the issue easily avoided, but I also don’t think this was a completely unreasonable design. Since Hugo actually supports JSON headers (not just via the yaml parser, but thanks for that tip!), that was a quick fix. But I’m also somewhat amazed that it was possible for the strung-together fairly standard set of Python libraries (primarily pyyaml) to not get the strings properly quoted.

Just the other day I had a list show up as [“a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, “e”, false, “g”, “h”, “i”].

The issue was that, without me being overly aware of it, the data was going through a data -> yaml -> data step.

Yes, the data -> yaml filter was broken for not putting general strings in quotes. But IMO the yaml design invites these odd “rare” bugs.

I used to like yaml, but was happy to see Toml taking the niche of human-readable-JSON, but felt the format for nested key-value was a weird choice. However, I’ve always felt we could just have extended JSON a bit (allow line breaks, comments, if the outermost data type is an object, the curly brackets may be omitted).

Even knowing the “correct answer” to this riddle for as along as I remember, I don’t think it is right. For someone looking for how to handle this in an interview, I’d go with this:

I will fetch a friend or colleague to look at the bulb as I test the switches because:

• It is by far the most obvious solution that literally everyone faced with this problem actually would use. It is easy to understand and will be easy to explain to others (if you, e.g. need to present or document what you did).

• It is also a better solution: it is by far more robust against a large number of failure modes: e.g., if it turns out you are testing the wrong switch, the bulb is broken, more than one switch turn on the light, etc.

• It scales better: the same solution trivially extends to N number of lightbulbs controlled by M number of switches; and at large N it will save time not having to reach each bulb.

• It gives the opportunity to interact positively with a friend/coworker. Helping each other out with small necessary tasks builds team cohesion and work environment, and thus lowers the barrier for further collaboration, making us a more effective team in the longer run.

Ackchyually-- IEEE 754 guarantees any integer with absolute value less than 2^24 to be exactly representable as a single precision float. So, the “divide by 2, check for decimals” should be safe as long as the origin of the number being checked is somewhat reasonable.