Thats a great question to find newbies. It shows that the candidate has deep experience with the language or programming. As an ancodote: I was on RailsConf Ber

Thats a great question to find newbies. It shows that the candidate has deep experience with the language or programming. As an ancodote: I was on RailsConf Berlin 2007, as a Ruby programmer with 3-4 years of Ruby experience. It was like being the grumpy old man (with 23 years :) ) in a group of young, happy and fundamentally unexperienced people. Most of them had about 6 month or less of ruby experience, they just hadn't seen the bad parts yet. I think any experienced programmer can rant for a least 5 minutes about his favorite language. Also, I think that experienced programmers can quickly find valid criticism even in languages that they don't use all day. And I think thats global. Most people aren't critics and will hop onto any prepared argument they can find. Thats why I hate most discussions about software.