Even in a lower-level language, is it possible to be productive on day 1? Instead of learning an explicit DSL, you're learning an implicit one spread across 10

Even in a lower-level language, is it possible to be productive on day 1? Instead of learning an explicit DSL, you're learning an implicit one spread across 10 or 100 times as much code. Imagine if regexes didn't exist, and you showed up at a new company and they had hundreds of lines of Java for every little string matching function. Would anyone find that more productive? Even if regexes were never used outside of that one project, I think they'd be a huge win. Especially at a bigco. My experience is you spend a while just getting all your accounts set up. Half the time, I haven't even known the programming language they used, so I spend weeks/months ramping up on that, even though it's not domain-specific. Spending a couple days learning a new DSL is just rounding error.