Here's some answers that meet your criteria: They answer the question, they give a reason, and you might disagree with it. "My favorite language is Haskell bec

Here's some answers that meet your criteria: They answer the question, they give a reason, and you might disagree with it. "My favorite language is Haskell because it lets me reason about the correctness of my program before I even try running it." "My favorite language is Python because that's what we used in school." "All I know is Matlab, and whenever I've needed to program something I've always been able to do it in Matlab, so I never bothered to learn anything else." "I guess my favorite language is C#. That's what pays the bills. Everything at work has always been written in C# or Visual Basic." "My favorite language is Java, because that's what I use to write Minecraft mods, but I actually work as a COBOL programmer where I have twenty-five years of experience." All of these answers are technically "correct", but the interviewer will inevitably judge some of them to be "more correct" than others. It's subconscious and it can't be helped. Moreover, when you get together with a team for a post-mortem and get asked what you think about the candidate, the answer you give will be culturally conditioned. So I can predict what many teams are likely to say: The Python person is "awfully inexperienced". The Matlab person is "a bit narrow". The C# person is a tool, of course, unless we actually work with the Microsoft stack. The top marks are likely to go to the Haskell or the COBOL person; victory may hinge on the team's prevailing opinion of Minecraft. Which of these answers is most indicative of potential success as, say, a Rails developer? None of them. There is probably no signal here at all.