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I don't agree that you look like you don't know a damn thing. You know quite a lot. In fact, I would happily hire any programmer for, say, a python or a C++ jo

I don't agree that you look like you don't know a damn thing. You know quite a lot. In fact, I would happily hire any programmer for, say, a python or a C++ job, that knows nothing about the language in use but knows to ask precisely these questions. Bonus points for questions about function semantics and memory management. Everything else boils down to syntax and ecosystem/tooling. The former is essentially irrelevant and the latter changes so often and is used differently in different contexts that there is little point in asking about prior experience.

philipswood 5y ago
It's nice, when doing actual work on a language you have zero experience with, to have a clear intuition about what to expect and what to search for and to feel confident that you'll be able to get things done based on having done it with so many other languages before. If it's not too unusual, it feels similar to other tools you've picked up before. If it isn't it's interesting. Something like: "Oh, OK, Swift has a switch right? Yeah. Does it require me to explicitly break? Yeah. Can I give ranges or patterns? That's cool, they use named parameters in Smalltalk style, probably comes from Objective C, right? Nil! charming, like Golang or Pascal. What do you call these ?. and !. 's? Reminds me a bit of ?. in JavaScript. It's nifty: you can enforce a value not being nil or specify a default.. Hmm, these guards are interesting, how do they work... Etc " So obviously you need to get someone to check for footguns in your code, but after enough playing with toys you tend to get to a place you can write solid code in a new language very quickly, and where getting to a solid level of competence is relatively quick.