Not necessarily the syntax of a specific language, but more the ur-syntax of what sort of operations are available to work with and what things they do. A good

Not necessarily the syntax of a specific language, but more the ur-syntax of what sort of operations are available to work with and what things they do. A good programmer doesn't necessarily have the exact syntax memorized for mapping over an array, but "it's straightforward to build an array by applying a function to every element of an array" should be there when it's relevant to the problem you're solving.