[yogo]

The notion of a rockstar is silly. I think it's somewhat common to find developers that can pickup languages in a short space of time. Once you understand the concepts of OO/procedural and functional paradigms something would be wrong if you couldn't pick up a new language in a day (plus some more time for best practices, patterns, etc.).

Greenfield development is always easier than having to work with 200K LOC codebase that is crappy for all intents and purposes. Let's see how quickly a developer can jump on, wrap his/her around everything, then make significant changes and maybe I'll believe in that nonsense.

Personally I think if a job ad includes the word rockstar, I would expect hot groupies and coke on the job (2 or 3 times a week to allow some time for actual work :)).