On a previous contract, I was the only one in the group that knew Perl. Much to most people's aggrevation, I started integrating my Perl programs into the system (a very large data conversion project). No one thought much of it, as long as I kept it working.

One of our biggest problems was that building the 50 - 100 C programs (with Oracle Pro*C) was becoming a problem. We had HP/UX for development and initial testing (including testing the build), and Sequent for integrated test, test cycles, and production run. Managing the differences between the C compiler, Pro*C precompiler and make all made things incredibly challenging.

So, along comes a late requirement to read data from multiple tables, summarize and munge, and load into another table. The estimate given to to develop the C/Pro*C code, test, and get the stupid thing to reliably compile was 1 - 2 weeks.

Perl: 4 hours. Worked no matter what machine you ran it on. Victory.

MungeMeister