I agree ... as long as you don't use said esoterica as an immediate qualifier/disqualifier, it can give you an interesting insight the depth of knowledge a cand

I agree ... as long as you don't use said esoterica as an immediate qualifier/disqualifier, it can give you an interesting insight the depth of knowledge a candidate has about a particular language. That being said, there are people who know crazy minutae but get into a team and simply can't turn out code at the rate you need them too, for whatever reason. Definitely have to watch for that and pay more attention to how they actually construct and write code.