[WalterBright]

Actually, if you asked me cold about various algorithms, I'd probably bomb the answer. But that isn't a problem, as when I need to know some detail it's trivial to look it up. But if I'm going on an interview for a job I cared about, and I expected algorithm questions, I'd consider trolling up on that stuff to be required homework.

[dozzie]

That's an approach I don't understand. If you would "bomb the answer", it means you don't understand and don't feel the algorithm behind. Merely "looking up some detail" doesn't help with that.

It's not like one can look some detail up when he doesn't remember the detail was even there. Good software programmer needs a large working set of such details to sensibly function in a professional setting.

[WalterBright]

Being an educated person is not necessarily being a walking encyclopedia of detail. But it is knowing where to find the information needed at the moment. That's why there are reference books for professionals, like the CRC Handbook.

For another example, nobody knows every detail in the C++ Standard. But a professional is expected to know how to look up a detail in the Standard as required. That doesn't mean he doesn't understand the language.

Maybe you never need to look anything up. But I'm not that kind of person, and don't know anyone that is.

[dozzie]

> Maybe you never need to look anything up.

It's not like that. I do need to check various things, and I daily run `man whatever' (I'm a sysadmin in large part). But even though I often don't remember what was the switch for e.g. `grep' or `find' or `awk', I wouldn't "bomb the question" about that. I would just substitute a sensibly sounding switch, explaining that I'm doing so (and why) and what the switch was supposed to do.

The same stands for algorithms, data structures, or program architecture (in other large part I'm a system programmer). I don't remember how AVL trees do inserts and deletes (frankly, I never learned that properly). I don't remember exactly how inserts and deletes work in B-trees. I never implemented my own hash table. But I still wouldn't "bomb the question" about any of those, because I understand how they work, and the details either can be worked out pretty quickly, or most often are not important for a particular question (unless, of course, the question was "how to insert an element into AVL tree"; then I can at least give high-level answer before calling for data structures handbook for lower-level work).

Heck, I don't even remember most of the cryptographic details. Every time I need to explain RSA or ElGamal encryption algorithms or Feistel net, I need to derive the formulas (I typically don't have any reference handy).