Quote:Well, if the question is "How well do you know C++", you could answer "Not at all" and still be an expert programming with skill, experience, and talent in many other languages. It might be a good idea to hire somebody like that since they'll likely be able to learn the language(at least enough to do acceptable design and coding) very quickly and then pick up the details later on as they work more, though of course somebody with similar credentials that also knew the language of choice for a company should probably get preference

hm, that's true in principle. However, with C++ (the language being so complex and requiring of programmer discipline), I wouldn't expect an experienced-but-not-in-C++ programmer to be able to write good code as quickly as you may assume.
What you say would be more true of learning Python or similar, which has less pitfalls and idioms.