You know what? I just tried implementing the Pascal's Triangle function. I implemented the general algorithm, recursively, but I had a bunch of logic errors that took me about 25 minutes to fix (one was obvious and embarrassing) - in the privacy of my own office and with a debugger.
I have over 10 years of programming experience and I probably would have miserably failed your "litmus test", especially if it were in an interview situation in front of a whiteboard. Maybe this just means I'm a bad programmer, but I tend to think that problems like "Pascal's Triangle" don't represent what we work on day-to-day.
I have over 10 years of programming experience and I probably would have miserably failed your "litmus test", especially if it were in an interview situation in front of a whiteboard. Maybe this just means I'm a bad programmer, but I tend to think that problems like "Pascal's Triangle" don't represent what we work on day-to-day.