[robrenaud]

I've done more than 100 interviews at Google.

The first candidate who I interviewed and was hired coded in Lisp during the interview.

I recently interviewed a candidate who did a lot of iphone development and was obviously very bright, but didn't code very well in straight C get hired.

Candidates coding in Python during the interview is pretty common and I certainly don't count it against them.

I am not sure what recruiters are looking for and filtering upon, but if you are good with C++ or Java, even if you haven't used in the last few years, that is more than certainly enough. If you aren't good with C++ or Java, but you are really good anyway, you can still make it through the interviews, but it will be harder.