Careful using that terminology. You'll get false negatives on people who still think in terms of *= syntax, and will tell you that the words "left", "outer", and "join" are all redundant and probably don't belong in SQL in the first place.
I used to be one of those guys, but I'm much less grumpy about it these days so I'd still pass your test. I have a sad suspicion that I'm on the progressive end of the spectrum when it comes to guys who deeply understand SQL.
Yep, I've done a lot of PL/SQL programming, and we've always used (+)= syntax and joins with all the tables after commas and all the joining conditions after WHERE.
Now I work on different project and we use join syntax, but I could easily imagine people that do joins all day, and not know JOIN .. ON .. syntax.
I came to Oracle after it adopted the ANSI syntax, so that's what I use. So my experience is the opposite of yours -- when I see the (+) I need to look up the syntax to remember if it's left or right outer.
It's so much better to use a database that only allows one autoincrementing value per record, or one TIMESTAMP and then only allows you to have either a create timestamp or an update timestamp without writing a trigger.
I prefer the way Oracle does it, you may have to do more work but it's more explicit and flexible that way.
I used to be one of those guys, but I'm much less grumpy about it these days so I'd still pass your test. I have a sad suspicion that I'm on the progressive end of the spectrum when it comes to guys who deeply understand SQL.