This post from Hasin Hayder has been getting a lot of attention lately as well as both positive and negative feedback (check out the comments) on the "I don't give you a damn, if..." method of interviewing.

From Hasin Hayder's original post:

The reason behind writing this blog post is I've interviewed some candidates recently and They dont know the name of the developers of PHP, MySQL or almost any other libraries they make their living on. They dont even know the history of these tools.

Both Vidyut Luther and Chris Shiflett have posted their opinions on the approach, both supporting his ideas noting that good PHP developers are passionate about what they do. That passion usually shows itself in learning as much as they can about the language, both knee deep in code and in finding out about the community around it.

Christopher Kunz thinks a bit differently, however:

I have to ask myself: What are you guys taking? Are you seriously discussing any kind of name-dropping as an interview subject? It's not only irrelevant who created a programming language, it's even a hindrance for interviewers since all that small-talk bullshit takes precious time off the actual knowledge assessment.