Sounds dumb but maybe they are trying to say they don’t like languages where everything is implicitly a references (Java, JavaScript, Python, etc.) and they prefer languages where references are explicit and objects can be easily copied (C++, Rust, Go).
In which case I totally agree. Making everything a reference is a lazy hack to get decent performance at the cost of unintuitive semantics (pretty good interview questions!) and making actual copying unreasonably difficult.
Until relatively recently the recommended way to deep copy an object in JavaScript was to serialise it to JSON and back.
Sounds dumb but maybe they are trying to say they don’t like languages where everything is implicitly a references (Java, JavaScript, Python, etc.) and they prefer languages where references are explicit and objects can be easily copied (C++, Rust, Go).
In which case I totally agree. Making everything a reference is a lazy hack to get decent performance at the cost of unintuitive semantics (pretty good interview questions!) and making actual copying unreasonably difficult.
Until relatively recently the recommended way to deep copy an object in JavaScript was to serialise it to JSON and back.