Hey kids, here's how to be a smartass in an interview. Suppose an interviewer thinks rather highly o

[henry_flower]

Hey kids, here's how to be a smartass in an interview. Suppose an
interviewer thinks rather highly of himself & asks you a question:

'What programming language constructs must exist in a language in order for it to be qualified as Turing Complete?'

How do you handle such an insult?

You get up, come to the whiteboard, take a marker & say w/ a poker
face,

'The combinators S and K where, (S x y z) == (x z (y z))'

(& you write the expression on the whiteboard.)

'and (K x y) == x are sufficient to express any (closed) lambda term, therefore any computable function.'

After that point you turn back to the interviewer & look straight into his eyes, then continue,

'In fact, the lambda term X == λx.((x S) K) is a sufficient basis to
express all lambda terms.'

The method cannot guarantee that the interviewer won't ask other idiotic questions, but in the majority cases it shutdowns his attempts to establish superiority over you.

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+1'd by:

1. Udger R

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