Having met a few programmers in the wild, topics of interest come up and languages themselves aren't interesting. However, differences in languages, or where languages fail, sometimes come up.<p>Personally, leading with a language is superficial at best, and at worst, a crude filter employed to determine whether or not a person fits in with your objective or clique.
This happens -all- the time at reddit meetups. We're clearly a group of mostly programmers and techy people, yet everyone describes their profession as "programming." I have to pry out what they actually do. That said, benologist has the right idea with asking what they do rather than how they do it.