While related and interesting, that article really doesn't deal with the central point of Joel's article: that pointers and recursion weed out mediocre programmers. A degree from a Javaschool does not weed out as many bad programmers.

One could set the same bar during an interview by asking questions requiring the skilled use of pointers and recursion, and most Javaschool graduates without other programming experience will fail. This, of course has a high rate of false positives since such people have never attempted to learn pointers and recursion and therefore won't likely get it fast enough to answer an interview question.