In his 2004 short essay The Python Paradox, PG argues (perhaps controversially) that a company can hire smarter programmers if it chooses to write its code in a “comparatively esoteric” programming language. At the time, Python was probably considered by most people to be esoteric in comparison to Java – in the sense that not many people would learn it at university or for career purposes. Therefore, the programmers who knew Python were people who learnt it for fun; and learning languages for fun is an activity which typically only the bright and motivated people engage in. Which makes the language a good “quality filter” for people.