Hello from Baden-Wuerttemberg Germany

Özgür, Salam and Tesekkurler for your introduction!

(not pretending I spell the words correctly, but hopefully at least recognizably)

Same age myself, but can't boast such geography, lived whole life in the same place. By coincidence recently bought some kitchenware manufactured in Wurttemberg probably 100 years ago :)

I wonder how many languages do you know (to some extent at least)?

How it happened you switched to programming? Just a hobby or pandemic?

And in which field of software development you work now, if not a secret?

"It is a C# windows forms app." I thought that Windows Forms were considered to be obsolete (since they don't receive updates anymore and Microsoft introduced WPF instead). Or is it not actually the case? Asking purely out of curiosity.

(their github seems to be active enough so I suspect it's pretty ok for them to be used in some mature enterprise project without careless jumping to something different... as the old wisdom says - if it works, don't break it)

Ah, it's "Merhaba", right, thanks :)

Thanks also for sharing your experience! I think 10+ years ago I was lazily considering opportunity to move to Germany or Norway for few years. Despite it is out of question now, it is nevertheless curious to know how people move between countries, assimilate etc. My nephew (aged 30) recently shifted to Turkey - he seem to be pretty pleased by his new lifestyle though he is so lazy as prefers not to study the language or pursue some engineering job - rather gets employed as mountaineer-guide. I feel it is not the proper approach, but probablly he has time to think better...

Also quite curious to hear about C#/Windows technology stack. Something extremely remote from my skills nowadays, despite I remember I was much pleased to code for Windows many-many years ago, directly for its API with long-long names and functions with dozens of arguments... Golden times :)

So your main background is in biology / medicine? Just curious because while I remember people here told they come from various occupations (from nuclear sciences to music) and it's very interesting to observe such mix of fields...

Hello Özgür, nice to meet you. I'm Robbin from The Netherlands.

I also work with C# a lot for my work as a Software engineer, mainly by creating web applications with C# ASP.NET. And I do competitive programming as a hobby.

Happy programming :)

(it's me, Rodion, sorry for confusion with accounts, was testing some features)

C#/.NET is in fact a great technology.

I readily second this! My professional way was mainly in Java and C# is its main competitor with obvious parallel ideas etc. However Java encountered stagnation phases once or more in its evolution, partly due to reasoning about backward compatibility. C# designers were a bit more careless, but it allowed the language to evolve much faster and to some of the features I remember I was always envious.

The main drawback of course is that .NET poorly developed outside the Windows ecosystem and the world, surprisingly, doesn't run that much windows on server side etc. Perhaps if Microsoft would pay more attention to supporting Mono from start, we won't remember Java nowadays at all, who knows :)

he probably is in the top 2% of people in terms of health and happiness.

Yep, I'm aware that Turkey has its own economic challenges, but, well, they are in all countries... The only definite thing is that working in IT makes people much more equal across the countries. Regretfully it doesn't work well for other occupations. I'm happy with my part-time job as a teacher, but I spent more money on it, than I receive - thus it would be impractical to try doing it full-time...

I am looking forward to writing my first application in F# one day soon

first time heard of it perhaps in 2012 from one of colleagues, it looked like counterpart to Scala (in Java world) - response to general interest to "functional programming".

However the "hype" for functional programming is declining (it seems) - and on the other hand C# itself allows good "FP-style" features so perhaps you'll find you don't need it much :) Still it is good to "widen" our programming experience to learn different paradigms.

.NET is conceived as a language agnostic

again I agree, that is one of the cool features. JVM struggles to be the same, but definitely there are not as many general languages for it (Java, Scala, Kotlin are most known, and there are a number of obscure things like JYthon, JRuby, Clojure etc). Thus .NET is definite winner in this regard!

It was a VBA

to VBScript and VBA I still have tender sympathy despite I'm afraid I won't use them ever again. They opened new horizons to me long in the past, so I can't bear when people speak bad of them :)))

Thanks a lot for sharing your impressions and opinions, it is quite curious!

Özgür, Hi!

Congratulations on reaching the next rank! You steadily climb into top-few percents of solvers :) Thanks for your perseverance!

Would you or could you do something to make it more attractive to solve the problems I already solved using another language?

Actually I tend to agree with you wise opinion (expressed in the line above) that specific language matters less than getting acquainted with general programming approaches, algorithms, style etc. That's why solved problems are shifted to the bottom. However if one would like, it's ok to submit solution in different language, they are both saved all right.

There should be option (above the table) to sort them disregarding "solved" state if it is more convenient...

As about "doing something" - I'm open to suggestions, but can't immediately think of some good options... Extra score for solving in different language doesn't make sense simply because source is not checked... Perhaps introducing some "Polyglot" Diploma? :))) just need to invent some hard criteria for it...

As of political challenges, well, it's true, but actually it seems all countries have them. Just these challenges are quite different and often it is even difficult to understand what they are :) Also it is often really difficult to judge what is good and what is bad when it is about politics, the matter is extremely complicated and tied to our understanding of rights and responsibilities etc...

There was old story about the sparrow, which had frozen almost to death in the harsh winter, and fell onto the road. Luckily the cow walked by and, without a thought, "relieved" herself so the sparrow found himself in the heap of dung. He warmed soon and started chirping happily. The cat passed by too and, heard him, found him and ate him. So there comes conclusion: "not everyone is your enemy, who covers you with dung - and not everyone is your friend who dig you out from that dung". Sorry if it is bit too harsh example of local sense of humor...

I don't think it is justice to other professions

I totally agree! Despite I myself am glad, of course, to have a good salary, I feel very sorry to other people who may need work harder to receive less (myself coming from "lower class"). It's a "market economy" though. The best thing we can do, obviously, is sharing some part of our income to charity causes.

Scaling up we may feel it is not justice that people in different countries live to different standards of comfort also. This is a kind of global political challenge but I don't think there is much effort to resolve it :)

Özgür, Merhaba, glad to hear from you!

And thanks for bringing the topic up, I completely missed the preceeding two comments, sorry, will return to them soon.

Interesting observation :) but probably it is "the first impression"? Though I need to keep in mind they made Java more weird since java 8.

As I perhaps said, Java is not as bad as people who write in it make it sometimes :) Bit toooooo thoughtful sometimes.

Perhaps in the upcoming years both C# and Java could be more pressed out of the business by Go both due to the latter being simpler and less demanding to memory which is costly when in clusters.

But anyway it (even just interview) would be good experience, I heartily wish you to have good time with it - and feel free to tell how it goes!

that IDEA did not warn me about some of the compile time errors.

well, Idea isn't Java :) despite almost everyone use it. the IDE (like others by JetBrains) is extremely powerful, complicated and still somewhat buggy. typical advice is that at very beginning one should try using some simple editor and command line tools to compile and run java, this gives good insight into things. then learning a bit maven or gradle as build tool and package manager - in the same manner. after that it is safe to switch to idea without damaging one's brain :)

With C# situation may feel somewhat different as it was produced by the same body which produced VS (I suppose you use it) and using command-line was probably even somewhat discouraged...

Nevertheless I believe you'll less or more easily overcome all this and will find java and its toolchain not as bad as initially it looks :) I agree there are many positions particularly in Java there (I even considered working in Germany decade ago)... And I guess JetBrains department is very strong in Munchen (?) - and they are actively setting trends in java world. So you are almost in epicenter :)

Now I have to solve the next few problems again in Java ... :)

I want to use functional features even for the simplest exercise

Yep, I agree, they waited very long to introduce them in Java, and when itroduced... these looked so awful. But Jetbrains are big proponents of their own language Kotlin, mainly popular for android, but interchangeable with java.

(name is due to the island about 15 km from me)

So perhaps you'll decide to switch (normally it is ok to use sources in both languages in single project, but Kotlin has some additional features like native compilation).

Now I have to solve the next few problems again in Java

Yes, by the way, Mathias is guru of Java here so you may like to peek into his solutions sometimes :) Perhaps he may even give more insight into situation around java in your neighborhood?

Yep, Kotlin is an island, protecting access to city from the sea, and itself housing small city Kronstadt (not sure if name is German or Sweden). But it just now occurred to me why they called language so: Java is also an island... What a discovery!

One day I am going to design a programming language and name it Heybeliada

Besides jokes, one of the first books on programming I read (and referenced in some tasks here) mentioned programming language LSE - much later I learnt what it is about - it's French! Meanwhile I know of existence of 1C software and language used here for accounting and business, which is completely in Russian. So there should be potential for programming language in Turkish - I guess it may be welcomed as education language also in smaller countries with related languages!

Dear Özgür, Hi, and thanks for sharing the experience from the interview!

There is some Finnish folk song (perhaps, student's song) which I don't know in original, but in translation it includes the verse like this:

In life there is place for everything,
Along with Good there fares Evil.
If your bride decides to marry someone other,
You never know who is more lucky :)

I guess it is exactly the case. If you ever want to start career of six-handed Shiva - this position is good. Otherwise it looks like bit too many too diverse requirements. Java EE (EJB) doesn't normally make sense along the Swing (which is for desktop). Both felt outdated perhaps 7 years ago. Expecting backend developer to write in Angular and Typescript is a bit ridiculous (java is not popular choice for full-stack programmers). XSLT makes me suspect they have some ancient parts of logic written directly in Oracle, in stored procedures, producing something to be converted via XSLT to SOAP XML messages.

I dare say that even for middle developer it may be enough to be acquainted with some parts of Spring (popular Java EE alternative), perhaps couple of ways of interacting with database (including some ORM basics) and building REST with this, optionally working with GRPC instead. Basics of SQL. Docker and Git of course, but they are relevant to any stack. Things like Elastic or Neo4J are specifics and normally employer should expect employee to learn them to some extent during trial period. SOAP, XSLT, Swing... May be regarded as stop-words. As for computer science, I don't see much sense for it in this list. Even this site has much more CS-related stuff than 95% general developers will need in all their life :)

So keep up good work, such interviews are mainly valuable for the experience you get from them, but probably not for opportunity they provide!

As about the native-based programming language. I recently discovered Lua (and now here are some tasks in it) - which I guess could be easily modified (either in source or with the help of preprocessor) to the words of different language - and seemingly is very well suited for beginners (being smaller than Python for example, and not as queer as Forth). So it may be a way to start. Surely this trick may work with Python, but it is much larger (and has more words to translate).

I read that Turkish is spoken perhaps by 80-90 millions people. I guess Azerbaicani with 20+ millions could be added straightforward. This is scale similar to French or Russian, so education language as motivation is quite fine!

It is curious! I read in wiki few years ago that Hungarian, Estonian and Finnish are classified as Uralic languages brought there very long ago by migrating peoples from the middle of Eurasian continent - but I thought all of them are pretty complicated, with incredible amount of noun cases - and now it is amusing to hear you find certain similarity with Turkic family :) But that's cool!

As of the song, Ievan Polka, it's really popular, particularly I often whistle the tune (I have the habit of whistling tunes on walk/run). Despite I never thought of learning Finnish, here in the north-west relations and sentiments with Finland (border is less than 100 miles away) are strong enough. Regretfully countries had conflicts during XX century and some territorial changes which remains the sourse of some grief... I myself happened to serve in frontier troops in Wyborg, so anyway can recollect few basic words, like tervetuloa and kiitos :) Finnish people are impressive for their calmness, careful attention to culture and eagerness to do everything properly :)

Joining here discussion from the second thread as it is also about languages.

Just notice how weird sie behaves in German!

Really, interesting. After your hint I at last learnt that depending on capitalization it is either You or they. Somewhat unusual.

The reason why I classify German and English as statically typed languages

Very interesting classification :) it definitely makes sense. I'm aware of the broader term "agglutination", as a method of creating word forms by adding suffixes (and sometimes preffixes). It is also typical for my native language and leads to situation when some non-vocabulary words could be constructed with some subtle and precise meaning. As a somewhat joking example I can take word kolotit (to beat, to hammer) which with the help of prefix (and some alteratin in suffix) becomes prikolachivat (to nail something to something) then we can build more preffixes:

• naprikolachival - I or someone nailed something to something in some impressive quantities (e.g. some labels etc)
• ponaprikolachival - did the same with more "past" feeling or sign of disproval
• doponaprikolachival - was doing the same during some period of time and successfully completed the work

I believe German is famous for allowing to build "trains" of words but I guess it is more about joining roots (which we do also but rarely more than in pairs).

Dynamically typed languages do not need the pronoun

Yep, in Russian for example pronoun could be (and is) omitted as it could be deduced from the form of the verb (or sometimes from the context). Verb ending bears signs of gender, person, plurality and grammar tense (we distinct past, future and current while state of completeness - i.e. perfect or continuous - is often in the prefix rather than suffix).

Curious observation is that most Caucasian languages for example don't have genders for adjectives - I remember spotting several fellows in the subway who were trying to grasp the difference on the example of the word "beautiful": "quardash" (guy, brother - their word) is "krasiviy" but "devushka" (girl) is "krasivaya". And they burst with laughter seemingly impressed by this unnecessary complication :)

Returning to pronouns - I'm currently try to advance a bit in Polish, which is realted (also Slavic) but mostly not mutually comprehensible with ours (partly due to many same words meaning different things). They notably almost never use pronouns (in nominative case) at all exactly because of "embedding" the person in the verb. Another striking feature is about respective You - they instead use 3rd form addressing with pan/pani (e.g. mister / lady). E.g. I would say not "how do you feel about java?" but "how Pan feels about java?".

Though perhaps the most well-known feature of the language is about pronunciation (an corresponding spelling of digraphs). This humorous fragment from the old movie is so popular that I often use this name for test user in the work databases. Hopefully it is not offensive to German people though.

"After your hint I at last learnt that depending on capitalization it is either You or they. Somewhat unusual."

Almost. The "sie" with small s can mean she or they. The "Sie" with capital S is used to address one or more people in a formal way, i.e. is a formal you for both singular and plural.

And on the topic of thou, if you use this in every-day English then you are living in the wrong century. :) It's very old-fashioned and usually only used in religious (and sometimes poetic) contexts these days.

The fellows you spotted in the subway probably speak a turkic language

Yep, I presume, they were azerbaicani. My knowledge of their language is limited to "yakshi", "salam quardash" and counting to ten. And understanding that adding "-lar" to any noun makes it plural - probably common feature of Turkic languages. Wikipedia insists Azerbaycan language is close to Turkish. Decades ago there were many of their people and we had a kind of working relationship with one family...

The lady looked at me and said "you have to select Caucasian". It was clear to her, not to me.

Very interesting story! This really is stunting. Turkce is so much in the middle of everything that it is difficult to categorize it with anything! I'm pretty sure the woman was wrong even by ours categorization...

Let me explain this - Turkic and Caucasian languages are completely different families, yes (something I learnt only few years ago). But "Caucasian" also means geographically related to the region. In this regard, for example, Azerbaycan, Armenia, Georgia - all of them speaking completely different languages - are what we call Caucasian - here "we" means especially ex-USSR people. Obviously lands like Turkey, Iran, Egypt don't fit this geographic category.

Quickly looking up "Turkish people" in the wikipedia I understand there is much to read as a follow-up...

I hope the opposition forms a government.

I'm a bit far from their politics (and perhaps any politics), I just wish to visit Warsaw and Krakow one day :) My wife loves the country, she spent here some weeks while in school. I'm big fan of some Polish authors, etc... so perhaps when we retire and things are normalized a bit... :)))

The "sie" with small s can mean she or they.

Oh, that's curious again :) so we are to rely on context to distinguish between "she" and "they" - or the verbs and other accompanying words will differ and give a clue?

And on the topic of thou, if you use this in every-day English then you are living in the wrong century.

Yea :) I have a hobby of reading KJV and recently noticed in wiki that in the beginning of 17 century when it was first published, its language already was feeling "archaic" but this was intentional, so that text looks more solemn and poetic (similarly to "Shakespear's language").

So as I understand, nowadays the only one whom we address with "thou" in English is actually The One Whom we call with "Thou" capitalized.

However recently I read curious novel "Shogun" where main protagonist, Englishman, when talks privately with the japanese lady with whom they have romantic feelings - author (I guess, American) made them intentionally switch to Latin to use "thou" as expression of intimacy. So at least the word doesn't fall out of vocabulary :)