And you work full time as a software engineer, or some other role? Honestly blown away if you work as a programmer that this sort of request would require looking at documentation.
I think it gets harder to remember exact syntax details the more experience you have and the more you have worked with different (but very similar) programming languages. I get what OP means: if you have worked with Ruby, JS, Python, Go, PHP, Kotlin, etc., you can easily misremember things like the order of parameters for a given function, whether if conditions require parenthesis, to use {} or [] for maps, etc.
If you have just started your career and are full invested in 1 or 2 programming languages, sure this may sound alien to you.
I get it. I've done a ton of languages too. But, like, that's so ridiculously easy to handle in an interview, right? "I think it's like this [show example], but maybe the hash rocket style is Ruby and it's actually colons. Either way, you get the idea."
If your interviewer finds that problematic, well, that's on them.
Not who you asked, but I work full-time as a Ruby dev. Off the top of my head, I don't remember the order of arguments of the #reduce method block (it's the opposite of what Elixir uses), the exact syntax of the throw/catch mechanism (in Ruby this isn't exception handling), the methods and parameters for writing into a file, bitwise operators, I always ask a LLM about packing/unpacking bytes between arrays and binary strings and many other things. I also mix up #include? and #includes? because these differ between Ruby and Crystal, and there's also #includes in Rails (AR).
So, the equivalent of creating a dictionary, yeah, sure. But there's loads and loads of stuff that I only use maybe once a week (and someone else maybe uses daily) and that I'd have to awkwardly Google (I use Kagi btw) even during an interview.
Same reply as above, you'd easily be able to speak to this in an interview and not hit the "fraud" alarm. "I think it's accumulator, element here on reduce, but I may have them transposed."
Your interviewer is probably also questioning if it's (a, e) or (e, a), but you passed the fraud filter.
