[smoll]

I had an interview question a few weeks ago (writing a JSON parser from scratch) that required me to remember that in python that a for loop allows you to iterate through not just a list but also each of the characters in a string. I forgot about that and spent several minutes wasting time trying to think of a regex-based solution before I remembered that was an option.

Why should an interview question reward you/require you to remember this? If I actually had to solve a real-world problem similar to this, I would google it, see a solution that iterated through the characters with a for loop and go “oh yeah, I forgot you could do that. Duh.” Why am I not allowed to google dumb things? On most days, my brain is focused on high-level abstractions that tie together two or more tools via disparate APIs, why the hell should I remember or think about for loops?