Ask HN: When you meet a fellow programmer "in the wild",

What kind of work they do is far more interesting than what language they do it in.

Having met a few programmers in the wild, topics of interest come up and languages themselves aren't interesting. However, differences in languages, or where languages fail, sometimes come up.

Personally, leading with a language is superficial at best, and at worst, a crude filter employed to determine whether or not a person fits in with your objective or clique.

This happens -all- the time at reddit meetups. We're clearly a group of mostly programmers and techy people, yet everyone describes their profession as "programming." I have to pry out what they actually do. That said, benologist has the right idea with asking what they do rather than how they do it.

...What a Geeky thing to suggest, talk about sports or women, brah.