> 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
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...