To be fair, AND, OR and NOT are enough to compute any function, and you can make all the other operators out of a combination of those three. For example A XOR B is just (A OR B) AND (NOT (A AND B)). Knowing things beyond AND, OR or NOT is useful, but not strictly necessary. XOR has useful properties though: with random inputs you get TRUE 50% of the time, allowing you to chain it without trending to 0 or 1; also it's the opposite of bitwise equality.
The others aren't that interesting if you aren't dealing with hardware, and their function is obvious if you know the naming convention.
Yeah, similarly in mathematics they often like to build everything up from ‘implies’ where the rule is implies(a,b) = or(not(a), b) = nand(a,nand(b, b)).
I remember being shocked to discover that a recent CS grad could not implement a factorial function using recursion. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to do that, but to not be able to do it?
a lot of CS undergrads compress out recursion knowledge. They learn that most recursion is best skipped in favor of iteration/dp, and they learn that they should implement things efficiently.
It’s possible the undergrad assumed you were referring to an efficient recursive algorithm or simply forgot most recursion.
No, I was quite explicit, and seriously, is it really that hard to write something along the lines of
if (i<=1)
return i;
else
return factorial(i-1)*i;
It wasn't meant to be a trick or trap, it was the simplest recursive function I could think of and it’s not like I was asking him to implement a stack.
Heh, I just did the DS+A section of a Faang interview, and got the time and space complexity of an optimal solution more or less correct, as well as most of a recursive binary search implementation, but not quite there. I stumble with recursion because syntactically it's something you either have to use a lot or deliberately practice to have a keen sense of return values imo.
Probably won't get an offer because of that. Do I feel like as a frontend engineer I really need that knowledge? Not really. I could work it out for work purposes if I needed to tho. I'd be practicing it just to pass interviews.
I'd venture 95% of JS and Python devs don't even know what the stack is. They might have some vague understanding of a reference type vs. a value type, but that's probably it. Even in something like C# or Java I'd guess it's less than half that know what they are.
If you want to learn more about logic gates, you might like the book "Bebop to the Boolean Boogie". It's aimed at kids but someone with a CS background could fly through it pretty quickly.
The truth is that you can be a successful computer software developer and not need to know much at all about how computers work. Or even how things like compilers work.
Some of us never even studied in a CS program - gasp!
It’s all layers of abstraction, right? While it’s good to have a basic understanding of how the whole stack works, it’s also a feature and a goal of those building the lower levels to enable others to operate at higher levels independent of that knowledge.
Taking this away from software for a second, I know a hell of a lot of people skilled in their professions that have no idea exactly how their cars work but they drive them just fine.
Oh come on! There are a lot of types of programming and most of them exist pretty far from logic gates. The previous poster probably understands the concepts from their work but doesn’t relate them to logic gates.
Heh, roasted. I know you're being a bit facetious, but it's not like I haven't used them, but in terms of the acronyms and maybe actually using them as bitwise operations, it's something I've rarely needed in JS programming. If you aren't being facetious, then you might need to work on humility
