I would say that you should keep at it. There are strong parallels between math and programming, but interviewers should definitely be asking you to write pseu

I would say that you should keep at it. There are strong parallels between math and programming, but interviewers should definitely be asking you to write pseudo-code on a whiteboard and do a paired programming session. That would probably be a good way to relieve the awkwardness later when they realize that your programming skills aren't as strong as you'd like them to be. Definitely keep at it, soon you'll be able to think of a Markov chain as a for loop multiplying two arrays and not only as a matrix multiplication.