I can appreciate this also. Your `sort` question reminds me of an interview where I asked the candidate to give me an example of where he used his general coding knowledge to solve a problem. He told me how he had two long lists of email addresses with duplicates that he needed to sort and merge into one unique list.
He explained his solution in which he spent considerable time writing a C++ program to do this - iirc it even wrote the unique entries to a db. He seemed stunned when I explained that he could have achieved this easily with something like `sort -u a.txt b.txt > sorted.txt`. Sorted! To be fair he was inexperienced, but there is a lot of power in the command line that some developers don't seem to be aware of at all.
In other cases, some developers who do know will still grab to the new and shiny solution every time. The simplest solution is usually good enough, and the most maintainable (if that's a concern).
Ted Dziuba's 'Taco Bell Programming' nails this perspective pretty well. I'm sure it has been posted on HN many times already:
Have you asked them why they are started to writing a code in first place? Maybe, since it's a programming interview, they thought you are trying to measure their theoretical knowledge than their practical day to day knowledge.
You should probably reword your question and give a hint that a candidate can use any available tool. If it's a programming interview my first instinct would be writing a code, if it's a sysadm interview I would use available tools in the system.Context is important...
He explained his solution in which he spent considerable time writing a C++ program to do this - iirc it even wrote the unique entries to a db. He seemed stunned when I explained that he could have achieved this easily with something like `sort -u a.txt b.txt > sorted.txt`. Sorted! To be fair he was inexperienced, but there is a lot of power in the command line that some developers don't seem to be aware of at all.
In other cases, some developers who do know will still grab to the new and shiny solution every time. The simplest solution is usually good enough, and the most maintainable (if that's a concern).
Ted Dziuba's 'Taco Bell Programming' nails this perspective pretty well. I'm sure it has been posted on HN many times already:
http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-progra...