> I came here to make the same point. The real test would be to take those same Lisp or Smalltalk programmers, and have them work in Java. I’ll bet you see the same increase in productivity. It’s the people, not the language.
A good example to strengthen this argument is Petr Mitrichev who has won numerous competitive programming competitions and his language of choice is... Pascal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Mitrichev
Because those esoteric languages are better. The comment I responded to points out that TFA makes the unreasonable assumption that the Java programmers and the Smalltalk programmers are equally talented. And that perhaps what is going on is that the people attracted to explore beyond Java are more curious and perhaps more interested in their craft. If that is the case, then I predict these people will be better in Java, even if it isn't their first choice.
For one thing, highly popular languages tend to have communities which are flooded by people who can't use those languages, can't describe the problems they are solving, or can't understand basic programming concepts.
Like, it wouldn't even matter to me if PHP is a good language if I have to sift through thousands of comments of "I did this and it worked" without any description of why it worked, why it is better than other ideas, or what problem it is even meant to solve.
I have given a lot of thought to the interview process over the years. As a candidate I really disliked whiteboard questions and trying to come up with clever solutions on the spot with hard time and resource constraints. I was always frustrated with how different the interview experience was from actual day to day work. As an interviewer I much prefer a hands on experience with internet access. For that I have prepared a short app riddled with some bugs and half baked features to be completed. For me it is really important to see how a candidate copes with an existing codebase as most people work in environments with large and mature ones. It is also important as the interview progresses to see when and how the candidate resorts to online resources and how they conduct their search. Some just continue to bang their head when they encounter a problem or DFS into the first search result they encounter while others cleverly start opening a few tabs and evaluate proposed solutions before selecting the one that is most suitable for the current problem they are trying to solve. Most candidates after completing the interview stated that they preferred this method to 'traditional' ones and some even said that they enjoyed it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/lebron-james-reveals-the-nig...