I don't find trivia questions like these very useful in an interview. Many of these are looking for a definition, often a non-textbook one at that, and people tend to be bad at that. For instance, I understand generators very well, and I don't think I would have come up with that definition on the fly. I could definitely teach you about them, how to use them, and even how to create them in Python -- but probably not in less than 5 minutes. But if you couldn't answer any of these, it wouldn't mean you don't know what I need you to know to start working.
The closest I get to asking these types of trivia questions is gauging how well someone knows the languages on their resume and deep programming concepts in general. For instance, I might ask them to compare and contrast C++ and Python if they have both on their resume, and sometimes help them along by asking about the differences in how they pass parameters to a function, for instance. But what I'm usually trying to find out is how advanced their knowledge is, not whether or not they're a good hire. These are core concepts I would expect any experienced programmer to grasp, though, not trivia.
The only other occasion I might lean toward the trivia end is if someone claims mastery. If you tell me you're a C++ expert, but you can't tell me how a struct and a class differ (hint: there's really only one difference, and it's the default access modifier), I have some questions about your claim. A Java expert had better be able to talk about garbage collection and the limitations/gotchas of the Java generics system (the phrase "type erasure" should really come up).
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I don't find trivia questions like these very useful in an interview. Many of these are looking for a definition, often a non-textbook one at that, and people tend to be bad at that. For instance, I understand generators very well, and I don't think I would have come up with that definition on the fly. I could definitely teach you about them, how to use them, and even how to create them in Python -- but probably not in less than 5 minutes. But if you couldn't answer any of these, it wouldn't mean you don't know what I need you to know to start working.
The closest I get to asking these types of trivia questions is gauging how well someone knows the languages on their resume and deep programming concepts in general. For instance, I might ask them to compare and contrast C++ and Python if they have both on their resume, and sometimes help them along by asking about the differences in how they pass parameters to a function, for instance. But what I'm usually trying to find out is how advanced their knowledge is, not whether or not they're a good hire. These are core concepts I would expect any experienced programmer to grasp, though, not trivia.
The only other occasion I might lean toward the trivia end is if someone claims mastery. If you tell me you're a C++ expert, but you can't tell me how a struct and a class differ (hint: there's really only one difference, and it's the default access modifier), I have some questions about your claim. A Java expert had better be able to talk about garbage collection and the limitations/gotchas of the Java generics system (the phrase "type erasure" should really come up).