I'm of the school that measuring trivial knowledge is not a good way to identify good programmers

I'm right there with you, but this list isn't trivia. It's a broad set of basic questions. In fact, these three . . .

   - What's the difference between accessing an array 
      element with $items[$index] and @items[$index]?
   - What's the difference between == and eq?
   - What do parentheses around the variable name in my 
     ($value) = @_; mean, and what would happen if you 
     removed them?

. . . are so critical that if you can't answer them instantly, I would expect you to experience long, painful debugging sessions on a daily basis.