[kenjackson]

I don't understand why those three things you listed would make a good developer. Who doesn't like new things? I want to find the person who sticks with the old thing, even after the shine has worn off. Everyone loves to code the prototype. And if you tell most devs they get to code the prototype and learn a new language at the same time they'd jump at it. In grad school, with every project I used a new language -- why? Because it's fun. But that doesn't make a good dev.

Again, I've never met anyone who is afraid to experiment. But I've met people who don't know when it makes sense to experiement.

And again, the problem I've had with programmers has never been because they don't enjoy a challenge. In fact, I'd say quite the opposite. I'd like to see more devs say early on that something looks difficult, and could use some mentoring or help on it.

I guess I'm just saying that this says almost nothing about the quality of the developer.

[ohyes]

Perhaps you aren't trying to find a great dev, you are trying to weed out the pigs in pokes. Anyone who isn't a total fraud of a programmer is lauded as an excellent hire.

It seems to me that just as with reading and writing, nearly anyone could be taught to program. The problem is that there are many people who are completely illiterate. Of those that have been trained, there are still many who are functionally illiterate (they can write godawful code slowly).

Anyway, I've seen plenty of bad code in Common Lisp. You'd have to assume that any language with significant market share would produce more bad code. This is because of bandwagon effect.

i.e. 'There are a lot of companies that want to work in lang_x, therefore everyone gets trained in lang_x, and if you just want a job, you learn lang_x.' All of the programmers who have been taught but never learned 'know lang_x', so you get them producing bad lang_x code.

The elite programming language fallacy solves this, by eliminating the people who only 'know lang_x'. If you had trouble learning to program lang_x, you aren't going to go out and read a book on your own time about lang_y or lang_z.

So lang_y and lang_z become 'elite' even though elite really means 'a bare minimum test if you could possibly to produce good code'.