Ha, good point, and an interesting question: What kinds of dashes did Dickinson intend?
It's a hard one to answer: We could look at published Emily Dickinson books from the time, but did Dickinson really pay that close attention to or have that much control over the type?
We could look at Dickinson's actual personal documents, but if they were handewritten, distinguishing dashes could be difficult even if there was intention there.
Fortunately we have troves of her handwritten documents; all of her poems were first printed posthumously. To me, she's using the punctuation as pacing or tonal markers as opposed to ligatures ("I'll clutch— and clutch— " vs "I'll clutch-and clutch-"). Many publishers style these marks as longer than normal m-dashes for that reason, which makes sense seeing as they are rarely used as asides.
Em-dashes have been the norm in every Dickinson poem I read, and I think it might have derived from the preferences of Victorian publishers, who I understand loved those long dashes.
I imagine it would have been up to the typesetter to make the call. The conventions for dash usage are fairly straightforward. You use em-dashes for asides, en dashes for ranges, and hyphens for most other cases. Its easy to figure out the right character from context (apart from en ranges vs hyphen ranges).
You want Robert Bringhurst, poet and typographic nerd. He gives them special withering attention in his Elements of Typographic Style. I think he referred to them as Victorian excrescences?
I've been using real em- and en-dashes for decades, in more or less the way M-W describes. MacOS and iOS make it easy to do, and growing up Mac kindled a life of typographical nerdage.
I think the lie is in thinking FizzBuzz is going to give you any insight into such matters.
Put aside your paranoia and just talk to your candidates. Ask them thoughtful questions that invite thoughtful answers. Probe gently to get at more challenging questions. Trust your ability to discern when they're BSing you.
If you want to assess communication skills, common sense, maturity, just generally knowing what's going on, or any other senior engineering quality, I advise you steer hard away from FizzBuzz.
There is no question Python is a lot more useful and relevant to modern software development. Arguably a better language for many use cases.
The question is whether someone learning fundamental programming needs to use a language with SQL support. I think that BBC basic or quick basic are better choices for learning, but that's me. Also, BASIC has gorilla.bas :)
>The question is whether someone learning fundamental programming needs to use a language with SQL support.
They aren't going to run into any of the issues you describe, either, because they won't need third-party libraries and should be learning fundamentals of programming before trying to make a GUI. But in the cases where someone reaches that point and is trying to use, say, the system Python on a Debian-based Linux distro, the solution is generally an Apt invocation away.
At Stanford Zimbardo taught one of the most popular classes in the university, "The Psychology of Mind Control." From my roommates I understand he would talk about techniques of manipulation used by cults and despots.
It surprises me not at all that Zimbardo would be involved, in the end, with a project warning about Donald Trump.
> It surprises me not at all that Zimbardo would be involved, in the end, with a project warning about Donald Trump.
But from a non-partisan perspective, it’s important to recognize that these kinds of psychological techniques are used by politicians across the entire spectrum.
Methods of persuasion and influence are used widely for all types of advertising and marketing, but some methods are employed more frequently by some groups than others.
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