IntroducingFizzbuzz: A Simple Programming Question

FizzBuzz, one of the most well-known coding questions, and one of the most simple, yet unsimple? For many who are used to coding -- even at a beginner’s level -- should be able to accurately solve the FizzBuzz question in a matter of seconds even if they’ve never heard it before. In case you haven’t heard of the FizzBuzz coding question, the question just asks you to write a program that when called, prints every number from 1 to 100 but every multiple of 3 it prints “Fizz”, every multiple of 5 it prints “Buzz”, and every multiple of 15 it prints “FizzBuzz”. Although easy in the eyes of programmers, it may be a bit hard if you’ve never programmed before.

Now that you’ve gotten past the introduction, let’s see a common solution for this question. Note that I’ll be doing this in python (programming language).

First, we will start off with a for loop, which is exactly what the name implies: a loop.

for x in range (1, 100 + 1): # Here, I’m setting a loop that loop a hundred times.

Then, let’s put our conditional statements which are just statements that when true, run what’s inside. For example:

x = 1
If x == 1:
    print(“x is 1”)
elif (x == 2):
    print(“x is 2”)
else:
    print(“x is not 1 or 2”)

Here we are checking if the variable x is 1 in the if statement and if that statement is false, then we are check if x is 2. If both are false, we can be sure that x isn’t 1 or 2 so we return “x is not 1 or 2.” This returns “x is 1” because x is declared as 1 above. However, in our case, we want to check if “x” is a multiple of 3, multiple of 5, or multiple of both (15). We can go about this by writing this simple code.

for x in range (1, 100 + 1): # loop through 100
    If (x % 3 == 0): # check if x is a multiple of 3
        print(“Fizz”)
    elif (x % 5 == 0): # check if x is a multiple of 5
        print(“Buzz”)
    elif (x % 15 == 0): # check if x is a multiple of 15
        print(“FizzBuzz”)
    else:
        print(x)

This program might seem right, but if you run it, you’ll see that “FizzBuzz” isn’t getting printed anywhere. Why is that? It’s because this program checks if the “x” is a multiple of 3 or 5 first, and then a multiple of both. So, if x was 30, it would be a multiple of 15, but because the program checks for 3 first, it would print “Fizz.” We can easily fix this problem by changing the order of what the conditional statements check.

for x in range (1, 100 + 1):
    If (x % 15 == 0): # originally this checked if “x” was a multiple of 3.
        print(“Fizz”)
    elif (x % 5 == 0):
        print(“Fizz”)
    elif (x % 3 == 0): # originally this checked if “x” was a multiple of 15.
        print(“Buzz”)
    else:
        print(x):

This is just one of the hundreds if not thousands of solutions that people can think of to solve this question, and although rarely asked in interviews nowadays, the FizzBuzz question should still be done to check someone’s basic understanding of a programming language like python, javascript, java, and etc.

Sources:

Python Exercise: Get Fizz, Buzz and FizzBuzz https://www.w3resource.com/python-exercises/python-conditional-exercise-10.php FizzBuzz: One Simple Interview Question https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPZ0pIK_wsc