Way back when I went for an interview. That was when Java started to get popular. The interview involved some coding, and I set a variable to 0 at declaration

Way back when I went for an interview. That was when Java started to get popular. The interview involved some coding, and I set a variable to 0 at declaration. The interviewer asked me why I did that. I said I know the language already initialized it to 0 but I like to clearly document the init state of the variable so others can have an easier time to understand. He said others should have known the language well enough to know the initial state of a variable. We went back and forth for a few minutes on the importance of code reading and code efficiency. At the end I realized I didn't want to work with people who were so pedantic on minute detail of a language. I later declined the offer, not that it was a good offer anyway.