Are you sure he didn't just walk out because he had other things to do and knew the others could take over?
Depending on when you learn that you have to leave, you can either say "Sorry, I won't be able to stay for the whole duration of the interview" or "Sorry, I'm needed elsewhere, my colleague will handle the rest of the interview". Leaving without saying a thing (even if it's just a nod and a smile) is more disruptive for the candidate than saying nothing.
OP should humble himself because A. It's not really that big of a deal, it's an opinion....about a dead language B. it's kind of an expected response in this industry. He also says himself that he doesn't even know if he asked what his favorite language was.
It becomes interesting when it's naturally followed up with "why?"
What the enterprise world does for languages isn't relevant. This level of disrespect, while representing my company, is deeply unacceptable.
The fact that this person felt this was acceptable shows this company's management does not keep a proper workplace.
All the people I was interviewing with recently graduated from a top comp sci school.
A lot of people have very limited experiences with Scheme in school, where they're usually forced to use a primitive Scheme from a million years ago. So they consider it to be a toy language, maybe suitable for education, but completely impractical for industry use.
They tend to have no experience or knowledge of modern, full-featured Schemes with large library ecosystems.
I wasn't asked why I liked Scheme, and wasn't given an opportunity to explain any of this or make the case for Scheme. We just launched directly in to whiteboarding... after which the interviewer who had laughed at me walked out.
Either way, you have to understand why a regular firm would laugh at that. A lot of these run of the mill places are thinking in terms of API’s. They don’t really care about combinators, run time AST manipulation, or true benefits of dynamic typing.
My guess is they’re cranking out Apps, or some sort of cloud deployment.
Honestly, I don't remember. This was quite a few years ago, and at this point I don't remember whether they asked -- probably not -- or whether I just blurted it out, because I love Scheme.
What I most remember is the slap in the face I got in response to sharing with them something that I loved, the awful whiteboarding session, and that same interviewer walking out without saying anything.
Or maybe the guy was partial to Haskell or Clojure or similar!
Or maybe he just came out of a long painful meeting where he tried to persuade a committee to let him build a new service in Scheme, but failed.