[jghn]

IMO this is a red herring. Even ignoring shifts in language and such, I'd imagine/hope that just about everyone would cringe a bit if they looked back at code they wrote some time in the past. It's natural - we're constantly learning and constantly improving.

I've changed languages multiple times in my career and yeah sure, one isn't writing idiomatic code right away but with a little breadth of knowledge and armed with modern tools such as stackoverflow it's really not a long transition period. If you add in a strong team and a strong culture of code reviews, the really egregiously non-idiomatic code will never make it in the codebase anyways (not to mention, the newbie will learn along the way).