I totally agree that it depends..Let me tell you why.

I just finished a project that took a process that someone was doing by hand (going to a web site through a series of pages, copy, paste into excel...blah, blah) which took roughly 3-5 hours a day, and streamlined it down to a couple hundred lines of code that is a click-and-walk-away process of about 20-30 minutes. That's a savings on the order of 1x10³% improvement in time.

Now I could probably shave another 5-10% off of the remainder if I wanted to implement fork() in this windows2k world here in my office, but frankly, considering what they already have, I doubt the end-user is going to notice those last 2 minutes, and the headache wasn't worth it.

When it comes to implementation, YMMV. Work where you're comfortable, and determine your trade-offs. re - Time and Effort vs. Return.

Just my US$0.02 worth.

C-.