I think what'd be even more interesting is whether a candidate can transform a simple recursive algorithm to an iterative one and vice versa.
It's taught in CS courses for instance but I know a lot of software "engineers" who aren't able to come up with a solution for such problems.
(Hint: It's rampant in the webdev crowd)
As a side note: Yeah I also think that recursion is really seldom needed, but sometimes it's actually your only option.
For instance I wrote a Future/Promise library with support for continuation for Rust (it'd be the same for C++).
Simply said: Since the Promise is a generic the actual type (and thus it's machine code) changes from type to type so you have to use virtual function calls to invoke the next promise in the continuation chain.
This obviously has the disadvantage compared to dynamic languages that the chain length is limited by the stack size.
It's taught in CS courses for instance but I know a lot of software "engineers" who aren't able to come up with a solution for such problems. (Hint: It's rampant in the webdev crowd)
As a side note: Yeah I also think that recursion is really seldom needed, but sometimes it's actually your only option. For instance I wrote a Future/Promise library with support for continuation for Rust (it'd be the same for C++). Simply said: Since the Promise is a generic the actual type (and thus it's machine code) changes from type to type so you have to use virtual function calls to invoke the next promise in the continuation chain. This obviously has the disadvantage compared to dynamic languages that the chain length is limited by the stack size.