[robashton2]

Maybe - I can't help but feel you're all putting C on a pedestal though - thinking you're immune from memory management issues because you're not using C seems a bit weird.

I feel confident that if I was asked to do C at one of these gigs I'd have been able to deliver something useful. Perhaps less if it was C++ because it's a bit swiss-army knife and there are a lot more "don'ts" to pick up.

[Mithaldu]

I'm not really putting C on a pedestal here. :)

I'm only saying: Some skills are so radically different that you cannot transfer easily from one to the other. To give a counter example in the other direction: When i taught a former Lisp developer Perl, it took him 3 months to get to a good level, and 3 more to be on a very high level. And he's an extremely bright guy.

Then again, he had never done web apps before. Maybe the language matters a lot less if you're staying within the same problem domain.

[robashton2]

"then they'll get on that stuff and make it happen providing they have some similar experience and you have an in-house knowledge pool for them to draw on." <-- some similar experience is probably another way of saying that.

If you asked me tomorrow to go and start doing system programming in a language I knew well, I'd probably be screwed. Ask me to work on a database engine, compiler or web app and I'd be okay.

I'm mainly focusing that ire on the typical enterprise stuff LOB stuff, where it truely is all the same and just because you'd been writing Foo v1 for three years doesn't mean you won't be able to write Bar v300