Humbling indeed.

His site may be having issues. I'll email him. Thou shall not tease the Hal. Hal is the Great One. (And I say that with utmost respect. Hal is one of those smart, and NICE, guys that is a true rarity.)

You guys aren't posting your score on his scoreboard?

Uh, anybody else notice that the quiz is actually an advertising campaign in disguise??? You MUST have noticed this. :) Though I am calling the emperor naked, I must admit though that it's a very tasteful and palatable disguise for an ad campaign. Perfectly acceptable trade - receiving a quickie edumacation in exchange for me watching "these important commercial messages". Well done.

Meh. Roughly half of the questions are valid OO questions, while the other half are situation-dependent theory questions -- no one true answer anywhere but on a whiteboard.

At least one of them he is dead wrong. (Hey Hal, go look at #25. You meant "explicit", not "static". There's a world of difference.)

My initial score was a 68.8, but I'd contest most of the Java vs. ColdFusion questions, as well as several of the design questions.

@Rick: Good point about the "explicit" v. "static" typing. While most statically-typed languages are also explicitly-typed, that's not a requirement. I changed the question to reflect your correction.

@HH: I'll share, although I didn't store it on the site. 46.9 - if I remember right. I need to take Hal's class. ;)

I haven't written any CF code in about 3 years, so I'm probably a bit rusty.

I got 64.something and I have to say that the explanations for the incorrect answers definitely come across as a marketing exercise.

I counted about 6 questions where I would genuinely agree with Hal that my answer was wrong. Pretty much all of the the rest of the *incorrect* answers were trick questions as indicated by Hal in the explanations. I don't put much value in a quiz that uses tricks to make you pick the wrong answer, so a few demerits for Hal on that front IMHO.

All in all, an interesting quiz, but very heavily weighted towards people who have read Hals writings and opinions. I'm not saying that Hal's opinions are bad. They are generally very good, but they certainly aren't necessarily widely recognized in the form and language he uses to present them.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the test is designed to make you fail if you don't subscribe to Hal's particular choice of language and perspective. That's fine, but it is important to recognize that Hal's perspective (while well worth listening to) is just that, a perspective not an immutable rule of OO programming.

I've removed the "or pass" part of the answer. I can see that it would be misleading.

I also removed a couple of the trick questions. I added them because I wanted to make a point in my comment and wasn't thinking so much about the actual scoring, but the point against them is well made -- and taken.

Whew, I was worried you meant the *other* kind of football! ;)

Also, the abstract question is a little bit dirty. You can't specifically declare abstract CFCs in ColdFusion, so I felt weird selecting "cannot be instantiated". "Should not be instantiated when using using a CFC abstractly" or something more appropriate given the CF limitations might've made more sense.

Fun quiz. All my gurus scored higher than me, which is reassuring. Hell, anyone who scored higher than 85 is now my guru if they weren't before (Michael Steele, fess up - did you google any of the answers?).

Coupla things suprised me:
Q5 decorator pattern: answer was #2 but this is also true for inheritance, mixins, composition, you name it, so it didn't seem specific enough to be the right answer. I chose #3. Even though I know that's not right it seemed righter.

Q9 lazy loading: of course you don't to use stub objects to do this, but "loading variables as they are needed" could almost be a definition of variable scoping.

Q11 Aggregation vs composition: don't get this at all. does this make sense to anyone else? I see what Hal's getting at, but firstly I thought it was the other way round (composition implies independant objects, aggregation implies strict lifecycle dependance - as in DDD's "aggregate root") and secondly it's the member that's dependant on the parent, not the reverse.

Q13 subclass madness: I'd never say a class is a "subclass" of an interface, I'd say "subtype". Is that just me?

Q44 what will this code do: LOL. Sneaky...

@Hal:

Q5: Ah so! Great food for thought.

Q9: If I read some data from a file into a local variable inside a function, that's "loading a variable as it's needed". Is it really lazy loading? I'd be thinking along the lines of partially instantiated object graphs backed by a non-object persistent store. Just musing here, I do see your point.

Q11: Cool, something learned - I had this totally the other way around.

No I didn't google the answers. However, I had been doing a great deal of work creating some internal frameworks at my job and had been doing some research on OO design and had been following a lot of Hals discussions. I got lucky on a few, but kind of had a prep for the test so to speak.