I’ve been reviewing a number of resumes for programming positions because we’re hiring programmers and I’ve started wondering what it means to know a programing language.

For some people it seems it means “I can write hello world in it”, and they list dozens of programing languages. From a resume reviewer point of view, this makes it very difficult to see at what level the candidate knows a language. It’d be much better to list only a few and give examples of the programs built on those.

What I’m looking for in a programer basically boils down to this: “can they come up with general purpose abstractions that give the program a self-consistent architecture or do they copy and paste blobs of code to get the job done?”