I totally agree. I'm pretty much a "what language is going to do the job best for me" type of guy. That's why the latest project is a mixture of C++, C# and VB. I needed to do some process control, so I used VB (a previous employee had a nice set of subroutines to steal, so I needed to add only a little code). For the I/O screens, I used C#. Then I had some *massive* data manipulation and reformatting. I used C++ for that.

(I originally wrote 'em in Perl. It took very little time to write, and they ran pretty fast. Then when I had to code 'em up again, I tried C#, but quit when I found that C# sucks mightily for the types of data manipulation I was doing--too much typing to do simple byte manipulations, and I like pointers for some things. I finally finished in C++. It took longer to code than Perl (far longer, as I had no handy subroutine libraries). But I console myself in that it runs like a rocket! (2GB of data files in seven formats parsed, sorted, filtered and rewritten into 12 output feeds .... 90 seconds!)

But if I could've used my original Perl version, I'd've had another 2.5 weeks to work on other tasks.... For the data manipulation I was doing, Perl was clearly better for 90% of it. (Maybe all ... but I'm not so sure about that. On my desktop it starts to suck when my data structures get up to 2GB of data. But that's likely due to my limited Perl skills.)

--roboticus