Comment by corrral | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corrral | Hacker News Reader

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> If you don't know your language's standard library implementation of common collections, you're not advanced.

Heh. I've written production code—and lots of it—in... god, eleven or twelve languages? Not counting transpile-to-JS languages—add another two for that. Also not counting markup languages or CSS or anything like that. Oh, and I forgot bash, if that counts (not sure I'd count it).

I'd probably get stuff like "how do you declare & populate an associative array?" wrong in at least half of them, and the others I'd basically be guessing but luckily several accept syntax so similar that if I used it on all of them I'd be correct in enough cases to get me up to about half-right. I'd have about as much trouble with this task in languages I last wrote fifteen years ago, as ones I wrote code in today.

Stuff that's common to most or all languages, I tend not to keep in my head. Any given language probably has this kind of feature, so I just expect it to be there, and not confined to any particular language. I crib off nearby code, let my tools tell me the correct invocation, or look it up. If it's anything even somewhat common, there's usually an example nearby to use as reference, so it hardly even slows me down. If it's uncommon enough in the codebase that I have to look it up or spend 10 seconds finding an example in some other file, that probably means I'm not having to do that often, so that's OK too.

That's fine if you're talking about languages you use infrequently, but if you can't declare and populate an associative array in the main language you're interviewing in you shouldn't be surprised if your interviewer fails you.

But to GPS point, if this is going to be the new production language for this person for the next period, they’re going to lookup how to do this in seconds and then be an asset to you. Would you really rather have the junior developer who knows the answer to this question off the top of their head, but has so many other lessons to yet learn that GP can bring to the table?

Honestly, once a person has demonstrated some proficiency in a cross section of languages, you should just skip the language proficiency section and instead talk about how learning new languages has gone in the past. Look for any red flags or biases that are going to be a hindrance in the new languages particular paradigm, but otherwise the “can you X” is already a done deal.

> but if you can't declare and populate an associative array in the main language you're interviewing in you shouldn't be surprised if your interviewer fails you.

What if I can google how to do that in all of the languages I've used (and many I haven't) faster than most can write it out from memory? How do I convey that to you and what is it worth to you?

Wrote memorization like that is one of my weaknesses but I can compensate for it. I heard an interesting theory that one aspect of intelligence is how efficiently you can forget information that you don't benefit from retaining. If our brains have finite storage capacity that seems pretty logical.

> how efficiently you can forget information that

I'm smarter than what I thought :-)

& frequently forget how to iterate through arrays and objects in Typescript although been using it for years

> if I can google

Sounds fine with me, or via an IDE, or pseudocode

I usually try to drill syntax for about 30 minutes before an interview, for this reason—I'll forget it a few hours later, but that's fine, since it doesn't actually matter—but it's hardly ever been turned out to be a factor in a 20+ year career and 7 or 8 job switches, anyway. I mostly do it for my own peace of mind.

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