Sorry. That title is the best joke I could find. For those of you not familiar with the cryptic title’s meaning, today I’m going to go over another classic interview challenge: the anagram. An anagram is a word or phrase that is created from a different arrangment of the same letters. Some examples to clear the definition up a bit further: arc = car, state = taste, listen = silent, etc.
Today, on my mission to understand JavaScript even better, I’m going to try my best to explain the this keyword. I’ve been studying this since my first Flatiron JavaScript lesson, because it caused me quite a few errors in my final two projects (and some still.) It’s one of those things that seems so simple when I read blogs or watch videos about it, but then still trips me up when I least expect it. Hopefully my research can bring you some confidence and clarity in your coding, or at least can point you in the right direction.
For this blog, I wanted to take a break from only solving CodeWars challenges for one of the more popular JavaScript interview questions. It seems like I’ve seen this challenge on every single blog I’ve read preparing to take JavaScript interviews. It wasn’t until I started preparing for this blog that I really understood why it’s so common. It’s not because it’s a particularly challenging problem (this author solves the problem with 2 lines of code.) I believe this question is more about being familiar with the question and being able to explain your solution than it is about how much JavaScript you know.
Maybe I’m projecting a bit here, but I think some programmers (me) have a bit of a pride issue when it comes to finding and fixing bugs in our code. In general, my go-to method of debugging is skimming through all the lines of my code, trying to find something that looks redundant or out of place, and then using the tried-and-true console.log() to see a value within the console in my browser.
No, the title of this blog is not a snarky rhetorical question about whether you like coding challenges or not. It is the name of this coding challenge on Codewars I’d like to talk through today. The gist of the challenge is to create a quasi-Faceook “like” display system. Here’s the challenge written out for us:
You probably know the “like” system from Facebook and other pages. People can “like” blog posts, pictures or other items. We want to create the text that should be displayed next to such an item.
Implement a function
likes :: [String] -> String, which must take in input array, containing the names of people who like an item. It must return the display text as shown in the examples:
likes([]) # must be "no one likes this"
likes(["Peter"]) # must be "Peter likes this"
likes(["Jacob", "Alex"]) # must be "Jacob and Alex like this"
likes(["Max", "John", "Mark"]) # must be "Max, John and Mark like this"
likes(["Alex", "Jacob", "Mark", "Max"]) # must be "Alex, Jacob and 2 others like this"For 4 or more names, the number in and 2 others simply increases.