I’ve read about some test someone developed that was supposed to work fairly well. You give a list of short psudocode problems and ask what values different variables have at the end. If they answer consistently, even if it’s not what any actual programming language uses, they’ll be able to program. If they answer inconsistently or refuse to answer (because x = x+1 is impossible), then they probably won’t be a very good programmer.
That is sort of what this is referring to—apparently that test didn’t work very well when they tried it more widely, so this is approaching the same problem from a different angle.
I’ve read about some test someone developed that was supposed to work fairly well. You give a list of short psudocode problems and ask what values different variables have at the end. If they answer consistently, even if it’s not what any actual programming language uses, they’ll be able to program. If they answer inconsistently or refuse to answer (because x = x+1 is impossible), then they probably won’t be a very good programmer.
That is sort of what this is referring to—apparently that test didn’t work very well when they tried it more widely, so this is approaching the same problem from a different angle.
I think you’re referring to the test mentioned here.