My favourite interview question that I received was when I was asked to write code that would serialize/deserialize a binary tree and was told it was fine to use "any programming language".

They received a crash course in the power of Haskell ADT and `deriving (Show, Read)`.

Those kind of abstract CS interview questions never feel that helpful to me, but in all honesty, your story sounds like a job of the interview working.

You were able to demonstrate that you were enthusiastic and knowledge about programming as a whole, which is probably more helpful than what they were originally trying to test for.

https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-intervie...