[Xoros]

Those white board stuff reminds me when I was a CS student in the beginning of the 90's in France.

We had our exams on paper. And believe me, writing LISP on paper, knowing if you forgot one parenthesis you got 0 point ("if I type it on a computer, it fails !"), was pretty and unnecessary stressful.

So I relate with candidate facing that. Dude, on your day to day work, you WILL have a computer to check those !

How can you decently check those skill on a white board ? I totally agree with what's stated in this post.

[e12e]

If you think writing lisp by hand is bad, try implementing a linked list interface in java on paper... shudder. (in fairness, we were sanely graded, minor syntax errors didn't subtract terribly from the grade...).

[metaobject]

Writing code for tests, on paper, has been a thing in CS for quite awhile. While writing lisp for tests, I used to sometimes write the code with no parens (using indentation to denote nesting). Then I'd go back and add parens where appropriate.

    defun add-pos-only v1 v2
        let sum 0
            if and > v1 0
                   > v2 0
                + v1 v2
                nil

[morgante]

No good interviewer is grading whiteboard coding on whether you forgot a parenthesis or semicolon.