9 years ago, Paul Graham made a controversial statement:
[W]hen you choose a language, you’re also choosing a community. The programmers you’ll be able to hire to work on a Java project won’t be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages.
He had a follow-up the next month to expand a little on that thought:
[Y]ou could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project.
I didn’t mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. I meant that Python programmers are smart. It’s a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don’t learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren’t satisfied with the languages they already know.
Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire.
I wonder – what is the “new” Python? If Python was what the Cool Kidsâ„¢ were picking up for fun a decade ago, what is it today? R? Ruby? Or something that isn’t as well known? Ruby is two years newer than Python, but seems to have only become truly popular with the advent of Ruby-on-Rails. R may be too focused (it being designed for statistics programming), though it is also 20 years old now.
What new languages / techniques are there? Are there any? Haskell is  nearly a quarter century old. Erlang is nearly 30.
If you were a hiring manager, what would strike you as “motivated” or “must be smart” in terms of language(s) on resume?
The question isn’t “What language are all the ‘smart people’ hacking in?” It’s “Is this person hacking in something unrelated to their work?”
I also wonder – how valuable is it as a criteria/consideration to know that someone is hacking/coding “something unrelated to their work”. Not that devs aren’t also hobbyists – but, personally, I think I’d find it more interesting if they did wood working, or kite building, or almost anything non-techy in their free time.
I think the goal here is “Are you taking the initiative in staying current within your field and expanding your knowledge?” Hacking on something outside of work is used as a proxy of that. I saw an article from a manager somewhere that pointed out it wasn’t a good indicator of success, which may make the point moot.
Perhaps a better question is “What really interests you, and what are you doing to learn about it?”
>Perhaps a better question is “What really interests you, and what are you doing to learn about it?”
I like that thought 🙂