I dread reading techcrunch technical articles. This wasn't an exception.<p>The author, a data scientist, interviews at start-ups and is asked to solve algorithm / data structure questions. Some of these were challenging in Python due to the lack of available data structures in the standard library (he used an example of a heap). He swapped to Scala and got better results.<p>Scala is also great with Spark. Scala is the new golden child.
Not to discount Scala, I don't know it well enough to have an opinion, but this article is shit >(<p>So the authors anecdotal experiences and subjective feelings after a few interviews is suppose to tell us what the "next big thing is" ? That's really hard to predict even for those <i>who do some actual research</i>. Most of the people he talked to did not even know the language FFS!
<i>This is a classic heap problem. However, Python doesn’t have a proper collections library, so to solve it I would try to import a specialized module like heapq, which usually wasn’t included in the interview environments.</i><p>This is an odd thing to say - heapq has been part of the standard library since 2.3. The fact that it isn't part of collections... just doesn't mean very much.<p><i>With a few exceptions, Python was clearly frowned upon. Of course, no one ever explicitly told me I couldn’t use Python to solve a problem. The coding environments always had a Python interpreter, but the interviewers would usually suggest that I use “a compiled language” (read: Java)</i><p>Well, actually they <i>were</i> explicitly telling him, right there. But if their interviewing teams would let a candidate go on and code in the "wrong" language (obviously a huge waste of both the candidate's time and theirs)... then they have much worse problems than any of us are likely to be able to help them with.
I have done a lot of interviews, and also been interviewed a few times.<p>I think:<p>- Interviews are significantly easier in a higher level language. You will get more done in less time in Python than C in general. Also less tripwires I think.<p>- Even more important, choose a language you know really well. If you can pick the language I will assume you pick one you know well, so if you don't know something basic that is a major red flag.<p>So I think learning a new language for interviews is a bad idea. Use it on some hobby projects first at least.