The 5 Commandments of Automation

Programmers automate things—it's what we do. In fact, it's pretty much all we do. Some of us automate payroll and billing, some of us automate the process of flying combat missions, and some of us automate the process of stalking people you knew in high school, but we're all in the automation business.
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Floating-Point Numbers

Do you use floating-point numbers? Should you be using them? If you're not sure, then you probably shouldn't be. Do you know enough about them to use them properly? Again, if you're not sure, you probably don't.
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Write a Factorial Function

Every so often, I hear about interviewers asking job-seekers to write a function to compute factorials, and I'm forced to wonder why anyone would ask that. I mean, I realize that the interviewer is trying to figure out whether the candidate has ever heard of recursion (or maybe whether the candidate can write code at all). But asking someone to write a factorial function is just inviting them to spew buggy and inefficient code onto a whiteboard. And in most cases, the interviewers apparently don't notice that there's anything wrong with it.
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