Comment Re:Buzzzzz word compliant. (Score 1) 232
So he starts off with stuff about how he's feeling old and the surest sign of it is bitching about "kids these days".
You need to have read more of Joel's writing. That's just his irreverent style.
Got to that point and decided that it's an obviously unsupportable premise. Read a little bit more, and my takeaway is that Joel doesn't know how to spot a good programmer unless they're working in C.
His premise is that, in order to be a good programmer, you need the right kind of metal aptitude which is a you-either-have-it-or-you-don't thing and not a skill that can be learned. While there may be other ways to test for that aptitude, his claim is that one sure-fire way to test for it is the ability to understand pointers. (He makes that point even more explicit here.) And, among today's languages that are in use, the only one that really requires you to understand pointers is C. (Many years ago, it might have been Pascal, but Pascal is pretty much a dead language.)