Re:Fastest Programming Language to Learn?
by eyelidlessness on Sunday December 26, 2021 @12:59AM
(#29690122)
The fastest-to-learn language I’ve picked up was Clojure. For whiteboarding, it has the added benefit that your interviewer probably doesn’t know it/might know general lisp concepts and you can handwave pseudocode as needed.
For “you can pick this up without knowing much about what you’re picking up” Python is almost certainly up there. JavaScript is a good choice because it’s ubiquitous but it’s a minefield and will be for whiteboarding.
To be honest I think the question is not setting the hypothetical interviewer up for success. They’d be better off learning relevant domain knowledge about the work they might be doing, and focusing on being prepared with good questions and generally explaining how they think through problems. They can use any language of their own imagining to express that on a whiteboard. If the interviewer wants something closer to real code that’s already a bad sign that they’re asking the wrong questions.
For “you can pick this up without knowing much about what you’re picking up” Python is almost certainly up there. JavaScript is a good choice because it’s ubiquitous but it’s a minefield and will be for whiteboarding.
To be honest I think the question is not setting the hypothetical interviewer up for success. They’d be better off learning relevant domain knowledge about the work they might be doing, and focusing on being prepared with good questions and generally explaining how they think through problems. They can use any language of their own imagining to express that on a whiteboard. If the interviewer wants something closer to real code that’s already a bad sign that they’re asking the wrong questions.