Wrong company / interviewer for you. Just move on. That said, here's how I would answer: 1.7 because of legacy and potential stability reasons, and I will eval

Wrong company / interviewer for you. Just move on. That said, here's how I would answer: 1.7 because of legacy and potential stability reasons, and I will evaluate 1.8. I need to make a case for upper management and demonstrate there's a significant performance increase to justify the time required. Ask the interviewer what he's refactored recently with lambda expressions. For PHP/AngularJS, you can always joke about PHP and how much you want to switch to the next hip language. Unfortunately the mysterious previous developer picked it and you have to stabilize it. You will switch.. (eventually.) For Angular, just say there's 30 other frameworks and you will get to it in due time. You can mess around and point the interviewer to that Todo list examples (http://todomvc.com/ http://todomvc.com/) and ask him why not the other 29? You can always turn it around and ask them why they went with AngularJS instead of some other framework. When I interview engineers, I do ask why AngularJS? I do this because I'm curious about their choices. Was it driven by hype or did they have a legitimate problem that was solved by the framework? I'm trying to have a technical discussion here and I'd rather do this than ask some random coding question. Given the limited context of your experience, I can't tell if the interviewer was being malicious or genuinely curious. Hope this helps.