“Dmitry, I tend to slightly disagree with you. Writing a word processor may show a lot of determination but does not entitle that person to only be considered a “real” programmer, versus other ones that do program tough tasks, realtime software or database related software, or design complex networking distributed applications and also deserve to be considered “real” programmers. At the same time if you need programmers who know how to debug the kernel then someone who has written a word processor might not be useful for what you have to give him. Of course you could say that the person can then learn anything quickly because they have written an editor before but that would sound elitist at best. In summary, you may miss quality programmers if you field off anyone who hasn’t written a word processor/editor :)”