Its funny, I was just performing an evil whiteboard coding question.<p>My question involves a sorting function and thus thinking of a problem one step at a time. Start with an inspection, then based on the element perform an action,  then marking some bounds with pointers to spots within array.<p>Since you&#x27;re doing this one item at a time, you&#x27;re <i></i>always just going to be incrementing or decrementing once<i></i>.<p>Even if I do a<p><pre><code>   for a in range(15): 
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in python. Within that loop, I&#x27;m doing an action on <i>one</i> item. If I&#x27;m counting I&#x27;m most probably counting by 1.<p>We do things all the time in coding by looking at things one at a time, that&#x27;s why increment and decrement <i></i>by 1<i></i> is so useful to me.<p>In this case, the candidate couldn&#x27;t not understand how to increment a &quot;pointer&quot; by one and wanted to solve it with a list. They still figured it out, but it got me thinking of this and maybe we&#x27;re moving away from really thinking of things one step at a time. To me, its a very useful skill, and the reason I ask the question.