Python Interview Questions

[l33tminion]

The more I learn about programming, the more I learn that I have a lot to learn. Take this post to c.l.p about Python job interview questions for example. Ones I can handle easily are in bold, trouble-spots in italics:

Basic:

• do they know a tuple/list/dict when they see it?
• when to use list vs. tuple vs. dict. vs. set
• can they use list comprehensions (and know when not to abuse them? :)
• can they use tuple unpacking for assignment?
• string building...do they use "+=" or do they build a list and use .join() to recombine them efficiently (but I probably wouldn't have thought to use that idiom before now)
  
• truth-value testing questions and observations (do they write "if x == True" or do they just write "if x")
• basic file-processing (iterating over a file's lines)
• basic understanding of exception handling

Broader:

• questions about the standard library ("do you know if there's a standard library for doing X?", or "in which library would you find [common functionality Y]?") Most of these are related to the more common libraries such as os/os.path/sys/re/itertools
• questions about iterators/generators
• questions about map/reduce/sum/etc family of functions
• questions about "special" methods (____)

More Advanced:

• can they manipulate functions as first-class objects (Python makes it easy, but do they know how)
• more detailed questions about the std. libraries (such as datetime/email/csv/zipfile/networking/optparse/unittest)
• questions about testing (unittests/doctests)
• questions about docstrings vs. comments, and the "Why" of them (then again, I don't use these enough...)
• more detailed questions about regular expressions
• questions about mutability
• keyword/list parameters and unpacked kwd args
• questions about popular 3rd-party toolkits (BeautifulSoup, pyparsing...mostly if they know about them and when to use them, not so much about implementation details)
• questions about monkey-patching
• questions about PDB
• questions about properties vs. getters/setters
• questions about classmethods
• questions about scope/name-resolution
• use of lambda

Python History:

• decorators added in which version? (method decorators are in as of 2.4, class decorators are planned for 2.6)
• "batteries included" SQL-capible DB in which version?
• the difference between "class Foo" and "class Foo(object)"
• questions from "import this" about pythonic code

Python Resources:

• what do they know about various Python web frameworks (knowing a few names is usually good enough, though knowledge about the frameworks is a nice plus) such as Django, TurboGears, Zope, etc.
• what do they know about various Python GUI frameworks and the pros/cons of them (tkinter, wx, pykde, etc)
• where do they go with Python related questions (c.l.p, google, google-groups, etc)

Other Process-releated things:

• do they use revision control (RCS/CVS/Subversion/Mercurial/Git...anything but VSS) and know how to use it well
• do they write automated tests for their code