I think what you're saying here probably applies to about 80% of the things I've worked on. Any competent language (of course, opinions about which languages are comptent will vary) would have been just as good as the one selected. There are obvious exceptions, though. Certain tasks just seem well suited to a certain language, or a certain paradigm which some language is more targeted towards.

An example I can think of straight off is I often find myself writing intermediate Perl scripts to munge text into a format more palatable to Java (XML works, because the Java XML APIs are quite nice). Personally, I find parsing most text formats with Perl to be much cleaner and easier than in Java. (Yes, I'm aware Java now has official regex support, but the quoting required is just nasty.)

In reply to Re: Why the Right Tool for the Job is always ... by revdiablo
in thread Why the Right Tool for the Job is always ... by autarch

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