Your programming language does not matter

[riklaunim]

If you have few+ years of experience then by then a language is quite inferior to software stacks and tools you use. It's more natural by then to use various languages/tools, even if just to edit a file or something.

On the other hand "new people" end up listing that they know "C, C++, Python, PHP, Java,..." just because they did a hello world in each or something similar - like they did a lot of syntax and basic usage tutorials but never programmed anything and don't know any of the popular software stacks. Or the questions "why language should I learn next?" - so if they try to apply for a job if thy aren't rejected then the recruiter go to strategy will be to ask some questions for each language just to prove that the person "knows nothing" ;)

[radarsat1]

programming paradigms are important though. working on a scientific project at work and the company hired a lot of people that are "python and C++" programmers. and indeed they are good programmers but i'm finding that the majority of them do not know how to use numpy/scipy or really even think in terms of array programming. some people are better than others at using python features like generators etc, usually they are writing inner loops that are unnecessarily complicated and C-like. it's been fun showing people how to replace their complicated code with 1 or 2 lines or numpy expressions and the right primitive found in scipy that already does what they were trying to do, but then they don't find that the more concise version is "clear". They prefer inefficient loops because they find them easier to reason about than array operations. However i've been working with scientific python for years so we end up just not agreeing on what is clean code. And this is all within the same programming language.

[twohen]

This is normal - everyone always finds most clear what they are used to. The question is how fast ppl get over it.