The reverse job applicant

I have helped plenty of people solve problems in languages I don't know. I would not suggest that this makes me an expert or even all that unusual. However, I suspect that a great C++ programmer would be more useful to a Python project than an average Python programmer in about 3 weeks.

You have a tremendous number of potentially severe cognitive biases in just these few sentences. In fact, it strikes me as wearing a sense of pessimistic self-fulfillment in as much as the article author suffers from self-entitlement.

You're not the only generation Xer I've conversed with. I'm right on the cusp between that generation and the next, so I know a number of people from both; it's an interesting place to be for perspective.

And yes, the other generation Xers say these same thing. They were more humble; they were less entitled; they dealt with pain we never had to, and it made them better. I don't think I can say what I want less strongly, so forgive the profanity when I do say it: fuck that noise. With this sort of line of arguing, there is nowhere we can go, because the whole thing has decayed into a battle of generation identity. Reason has exited the building, because you have a vested interest in preserving your sense of superiority in your own identity. At what point could any of us convince you to rethink that? If you say never, then you have a sense of entitlement brought about by your generational brand. You don't get a pass for that any more than the author here gets for his sense of entitlement to some form of employment.

It's ridiculous: I'm supposed to pay more attention to your thoughts, simply because you felt forced into certain sacrifices. How about I pay more attention to your thoughts because they seem more right, and we yank generation identity out of this?

There are a few tidbits I pulled out of the conversation that I think would be interesting to discuss apart from the context of self-entitlement, but I worry they're going to get drowned out in the noise. We're too busy beating down someone else, ostensibly because we think they need to be brought down a peg, but then we say shit like this that is so logically fallacious that it makes this whole thread seem not for the purest of ends. I was with you when you made your first reply above; now I'm not so sure.

> I'm calling you not particularly self-aware.

Based on no real data except your prejudices.

> Unless that language is so domain specific that there's no room for design or so derivative that you can apply another language's style 100%, you almost definitely still have more to learn after 2 weeks.

There's a vast chasm between "understands the language's semantics" and "has no more to learn." I've been programming for over a decade now and there's no language about which I can say "I have no more to learn." If all you're saying is that it takes more than two weeks to know a language completely, you're not saying anything useful at all.

With regards to the language's domain specificity, it's a standard procedural language, with types and functions and values and loops and all the ordinary stuff that languages like C and PL/I and FORTRAN and Modula-2 all have had since the 60s and 70s. It has first-class and higher-order functions, like Lisp has had since 1958. It has a few declarative features mildly reminiscent of Prolog to enable transparent parallelization.

Hell, look it up yourself if you're especially interested. It's Sawzall: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.169....

There is extremely little that is new in production programming languages these days. Practically every feature of every language that anyone significant is using in production has some analogue in the languages I know. What little remains is not difficult for me to learn because programming languages are my personal area of interest in computer science. I'm not being arrogant here, I'm just being real.

Take a look at Go. A fun post was made soon after Go was released which compared it to "Brand X", an unnamed language few people have heard of: http://www.cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/ . It turns out that practically every idea in Go is also present in Brand X; it wouldn't be unreasonable to call Go "derivative" with regards to its nature, if not the process by which it was created. I'll spoil the big reveal for you and save you the time of reading the post: "Brand X" is Algol 60, designed and implemented half a century ago. Practically every language can be dismissed as "derivative" if you're looking for a way to negate good programmers' abilities to learn something new.

> Semantics, that's all true, but if you don't have enough experience in the language to even say you kinda know the library, you probably don't actually grok the semantics.

You're wrong. Understanding of a language's semantics is prerequisite to understanding its library. Before a person can even consider understanding and learning the libraries for a language, he must understand the semantics of function calls, conditionals, loops, etc. He must understand whether the language is call-by-value or call-by-name or call-by-need or call-by-object-reference. He must understand how the language handles scoping. He must understand which entities are first-class and which are not. All of this is necessary (though not sufficient) for even beginning to grok the standard library. On the other hand, understanding the standard library is absolutely inessential to understanding the semantics of a language: if a programmer doesn't know what functions and types are available in the standard library, with knowledge of the language's semantics he can reimplement them easily.

> For example, Java, can you tell me the difference between volatile and synchronized as it regards the memory model without looking it up? What's a happens-before relationship and how is it relevant to those keywords? What's the transient modifier do?

I didn't claim to be a Java guru. Very few Java programmers actually need to know the answers to those questions in day-to-day programming; I could probably (if asked to, which I'm not, thankfully) write thousands or tens of thousands of lines of Java without ever needing to know the answer to those. There's certainly a difference between my understanding of Java's semantics and the understanding necessary to answer the questions you're asking, but for the vast majority of tasks, productivity happens far closer to my end than yours.

That might have worked in a different world.

Today, the only thing you want to do is hire public relations firm to tell people how you humble and gracious you are...

"Be humble and gracious until you actually distinguish yourself"

How about: "Be humble and gracious.(Period)"

I think it is important to understand the tone in which he wrote this. He is not serious, but he is doing this to garner attention. Your response doesn't match his intended tone.

It is like someone being upset at a joke; you are taking it too serious.