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One of the things that can be tricky about this happens when you’ve legit worked in a few languages and the semantics are perfectly clear in your head but the syntax for any language you haven’t used recently is crowded out by those you have.

I needed a small perl script recently (perl 5’s feature set & stability plus availability in the environment made it the right fit) and realized after 15+ years of no perl much of the specific syntax was fuzzy to outright gone from my head even though I’d contributed to large perl projects for years.

Python work is much more recent, but I’d bet I would accidentally mix in some JS or even PHP syntax doing the dictionary assignment, at least w/o a cursory lookup. I’d like to think it’d come through that I know what a dict is and what it means to set one up and operate over it, but who knows, I might be interviewing with someone who is evaluating skill on the basis of immediacy of syntactic recall.




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