I still view this as a way to separate those who can hardly program at all from those who can. It is probably not a good way to measure if anyone is a great dev

I still view this as a way to separate those who can hardly program at all from those who can. It is probably not a good way to measure if anyone is a great developer. The first part should probably be possible to answer by just talking to the person and to a few people he has worked with. Besides my main arguments agains this there is another problem with this kind of questions: when the questions become known and people start writing answers all over the net (just look at a lot of comments on this page) someone could learn the answer without being or getting good at programming.