[DanielN]

I've had this feeling before and I've worked with people who express this feeling. My question is, what is the alternative to having this feeling.

You want to show that you are now knowledgable of better methods and you would like the criticizer to recognize that your mistakes are not ones that you are still making. Furthermore, you can't really blame the criticizer, they're just trying to help you become a better programmer.

It seems all you can really do is give the sheepish grin and say "yeah, well, that was written at a very foolish time in my life..."

[quanticle]

The alternative is to be a smug overconfident jerk who trots out outdated or sometimes entirely wrong justifications for ill considered design decisions. The alternative is being a developer who continues to do things day after day in bash and C because Perl and Python are "too heavyweight".

Feeling guilty shows that you've grown and that you know more today than you did when you built the system you're feeling guilty about. I'll take the guilty feeling as a side effect of growth when the alternative is stasis and stagnation.

[sopooneo]

There is a rational middle ground.