I find syntax related questions really dumb. I think as developers we should focus on how a person approaches a problem rather than if he has good syntactical knowledge of one language. I may be pointing towards a more algorithmic approach but i too hate questions like the one pointed out by Ehsan Fazeli. And yes the also the How you rate yourself question. The GitHub approach is nice but even if a person is not very much active on Github we can still get a better idea of a persons grasp on particular concepts without asking them trivial questions.