Not at all. His comment was worse in that it generalized a whole lot of people based on the minor evidence he's been able to collect. Unless he's had several dozen, at least, Java applicants, as well as dozens of Rust applicants, I assume he's just using the exact same plain old discriminatory thinking people used to employ when comparing, among many things, race and nationalities. It's incredibly hard to generalize anything about people honestly.

> whereas the other requires going out of your way to pick up, could well be a factor in the latter having more knowledgeable average applicants

I disagree. It's much more likely, in my view, that newer languages will appeal to people who value the wrong things in a business, like which language they want to use for the excitment of being in the cutting edge (not to mention technically as well - we've tried for so long to create languages that make software engineering better, but anyone with a long experience in trying things will know that language is very low in the list of things that help: many studies have shown that over the years)... which also tends to correlate with people who will leave the job as soon as something new catch their eye.

Except in extremely niche cases, the language is not that important. The only things that really help writing software are static types and tests... and that doesn't mean the more the better either: there's a diminishing return with both. That's why Haskell is NOT the pinnacle of software engineering, despite what some fanatics will try to tell you (proof of which is that almost no important software is written in Haskell or languages like it - I think the most successful type-rich language so far is actually Rust!).

> I presume the majority of Rust programmers learn it online.

What I meant is that in their region, there's a good chance that learning another language is useless to find a job because all jobs are in Java or C#/C++.

But I do advise younger people to learn many languages anyway because of the fact that it really helps them think better and not get stuck with a particular approach to software engineering when there's many.