Our rule is that we really don't care what you code in - just as long there's at least one (preferably two :) people on the team that can review/fix in that language.

The rule finally came about after an all night hack session to deflect an intense DOS attack on our servers. One of the sysadmins wrote a beautiful script in python, except it didn't always work - he went to bed after 18hrs and I was left staring at some lovely incomprehensible (to me) code. So I had to grab the gist of it and rewrite in Perl (fume). Fortunately it was only a hundred lines or so.

We also now have a (relatively) new guy who loves Java, but that seems to have fizzled out.

I think you're totally on the ball Perrin. There's always a bunch of crap with flame wars. But what does happen is slow osmosis. I've just started loving awk. No way I'll ever write anything big in it, but I've been convinced of its usefulness and have incorporated it into my daily regime. I think that's what's happening with Java (to a degree). People find a great solution to something in Perl that would take 5 times as many lines in Java, and they squirrel it away. Slowly, they start to use more Perl and then get sucked in.

This is turning into a rant without a point and with too much beer, so I'll cut my losses and quit right now.

cLive ;-)