Reality check: if you say on your resume that you know python, then you should be able to make a dictionary with three items and assign it to a variable without googling anything.
Fair point. I don’t like resumes in which people state that they know X or Y. I prefer the ones focused on what problems were resolved using what technologies.
I have used Python to solve average business problems, yet I cannot produce non trivial code without looking at the documentation. Same for the other dozen programming languages I have used in the past.
I know enough python to read Calibre's code and understand it, but I keep forgetting syntax details and the actual name of methods and properties, because I'm influenced by whatever language I've been writing in lately. I know what to do, but it will be pseudo-python-code.
That can usually be solved by a quick read of the reference documentation (2-5 mn?).
That's fair. After you know more than a few languages, it's easy to know what you want to express in it and the limitations it has, while the particular name they happened to give those concepts is pretty arbitrary and quickly peeked at if you haven't used it in a while.
For my part, I've written enough python that I doubt the literal syntax will ever be far from my fingers.
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.
