Aristotle Pagaltzis of Plasmasturm about hiring people with no experience in some specific programming language:
[…] if I was a manager, I’d consider someone who has no experience with the tools the company uses but no problem picking them up within a short timeframe […] to be more appealing than someone who has 10 years of experience with the tools in use but no capacity for picking up new ones.
Experience with specific languages can be a plus, naturally, but in most cases programming languages are really more like programming /dialects/, and a smart programmer should be able to pick up new dialects fairly easily.
So very true. Would you turn down, say, John Carmack if he applied to your Python position having no previous experience? Or David ‘Hacker of the Year’ Heinemeier Hansson for your C++ position?