Are we saying "can't do it in an interview without access to some resources", "can't do it in the amount of time I'm willing to learn the language", or truly a "I could never do this even if I dedicated time to it and had standard resources to work with"?
For me, I 'can't' do the first one even in languages I commonly use as I almost never write the code for the initial entry point. Either I'm working on an existing project of the IDE generates it and I never look closely at it so I'll likely mess something up.
If it is the second, it is more a of an 'I won't' do it in some languages. I don't doubt my ability to do it, I just don't have plans on learning many of these languages. I'll read an article on how BF works, but I don't plan to spend more time on it than that.
If it is the third option, then I'm quite bothered by level of defeatism in it and would be surprised by a programmer saying it. It is something I hear from people who took a coding class, barely passed, and decided not to touch the topic again. Even then I would challenge those people as having the ability to do it but having (entirely valid) reasons not to spend time on the attempt. (I make such a challenge because I think it is beneficial for people to not put themselves down and to draw a distinction between something they can't do and something they do have the power to do but don't have enough reason to do.)
Are we saying "can't do it in an interview without access to some resources", "can't do it in the amount of time I'm willing to learn the language", or truly a "I could never do this even if I dedicated time to it and had standard resources to work with"?
For me, I 'can't' do the first one even in languages I commonly use as I almost never write the code for the initial entry point. Either I'm working on an existing project of the IDE generates it and I never look closely at it so I'll likely mess something up.
If it is the second, it is more a of an 'I won't' do it in some languages. I don't doubt my ability to do it, I just don't have plans on learning many of these languages. I'll read an article on how BF works, but I don't plan to spend more time on it than that.
If it is the third option, then I'm quite bothered by level of defeatism in it and would be surprised by a programmer saying it. It is something I hear from people who took a coding class, barely passed, and decided not to touch the topic again. Even then I would challenge those people as having the ability to do it but having (entirely valid) reasons not to spend time on the attempt. (I make such a challenge because I think it is beneficial for people to not put themselves down and to draw a distinction between something they can't do and something they do have the power to do but don't have enough reason to do.)