I saw a Reddit post bemoaning that universities teaching Java or Python rather than C++ to students as their first language is causing the quality of CS graduates to decrease, because students “aren’t having to demonstrate mastery of a difficult language”. There’s a whole bunch of things wrong with this and just about anyone who reads my toots will probably already understand them so there’s no point in me listing objections here.

That said, this take is actually kind of interesting? Incorrect and ill-intentioned, clearly, but it implies that the poster thinks the best indicator of a developer’s skill is their ability to work *against* their language. I’m wondering how common this view is now. I can see the logic behind it but at this point in my career it feels totally alien to me.