I hate to break it to you, but saying your favorite language is Scheme would get A LOT of interviewers to laugh, especially in the enterprise world where Java and C# are dominant. These aren't usually Hacker News browsing people, and if they have any association with Lisp, it's through a college course, rarely independent interest.
Are you sure he didn't just walk out because he had other things to do and knew the others could take over?
As an interview question, "What's your favourite language?" is only interesting if you don't ask it having a "correct answer" in mind.
Depending on when you learn that you have to leave, you can either say "Sorry, I won't be able to stay for the whole duration of the interview" or "Sorry, I'm needed elsewhere, my colleague will handle the rest of the interview". Leaving without saying a thing (even if it's just a nod and a smile) is more disruptive for the candidate than saying nothing.
That is true, it's not the nicest way to leave, certainly not how I would. But we all know "no nonsense" people who behave this way. All I'm trying to say is there's no definite reason as to why he got up and left.
I really dislike how you commiserate over this post like he's some sort of victim.
OP should humble himself because A. It's not really that big of a deal, it's an opinion....about a dead language B. it's kind of an expected response in this industry. He also says himself that he doesn't even know if he asked what his favorite language was.
It doesn't really matter why - I don't see any excuses for rude to someone in an interview - particularly someone who has just supplied a perfectly reasonable answer.
In general, if an interviewer even laughed at a candidate for saying Visual Basic, I'd rip them off the interviewing team permanently, and reconsider whether they needed to work for me
What the enterprise world does for languages isn't relevant. This level of disrespect, while representing my company, is deeply unacceptable.
The fact that this person felt this was acceptable shows this company's management does not keep a proper workplace.
As an interviewer, I'd never mock somebody for saying their favorite language was Scheme (or any other language). I'd ask why it's their favorite, and maybe that day I'd be the one learning.
All the people I was interviewing with recently graduated from a top comp sci school.
A lot of people have very limited experiences with Scheme in school, where they're usually forced to use a primitive Scheme from a million years ago. So they consider it to be a toy language, maybe suitable for education, but completely impractical for industry use.
They tend to have no experience or knowledge of modern, full-featured Schemes with large library ecosystems.
I wasn't asked why I liked Scheme, and wasn't given an opportunity to explain any of this or make the case for Scheme. We just launched directly in to whiteboarding... after which the interviewer who had laughed at me walked out.
I don’t mean offense by this, but did they actually ask what your favorite language was?
Either way, you have to understand why a regular firm would laugh at that. A lot of these run of the mill places are thinking in terms of API’s. They don’t really care about combinators, run time AST manipulation, or true benefits of dynamic typing.
My guess is they’re cranking out Apps, or some sort of cloud deployment.
"did they actually ask what your favorite language was?"
Honestly, I don't remember. This was quite a few years ago, and at this point I don't remember whether they asked -- probably not -- or whether I just blurted it out, because I love Scheme.
What I most remember is the slap in the face I got in response to sharing with them something that I loved, the awful whiteboarding session, and that same interviewer walking out without saying anything.
If pmoriarty was asked what his personal favourite language was I'd regard Scheme as a pretty interesting answer if I was an interviewer as it would indicate, to me at least, a genuine passion for the subject.
Pretty much, unless asked, these places don't really want to hear about pure interests. You say Lisp in terms of industry relevance, they might be thinking "Okay, this guy is clearly a luddite and would make a scary employee".
Are you sure he didn't just walk out because he had other things to do and knew the others could take over?