humm, Select a language that's right for the job. Yup, true. I used to be very strong at going with language X and saying "I will stick with it no matter what :)". First, it was C++, and I wouldn't think of other ones. Well, I thought about learning Perl and maybe other languages, but there wasn't much incentive. Then it was Java, and transition to Java from C++ was pretty troublesome with a lot of 'counseling' talks with instructors who kept convincing me to try it out. Actually for those classes Java was much easier to write programs in than in C++. That's cause the instructor was using Java. Now it's PHP. PHP really gave me a way into Perl. Perl gave me a way into regexp. I now understand regexp ! Yupiiee ! :) hehe
I had a real 'kick' when after working tediously and writing over 10 different in C++ to extract data from some very weird database (clean up weird chars, align, etc).. suddenly, I had an enlightment. I understood something about the very nature of the database and Perl. I've discovered a Perl module that was right for the job. Voila, I wrote ONE program in Perl to extract the data from each database, nice, clean no problem. woooHoOooOH,
I think that if you stick to one language, you learn it better to see how it does things. I think it's good to know at least one language well so when you get in trouble, you can always count on that language.
So it's good when you can use several languages and interchange them when needed. That way you can use the "right tool for the job."
All this, however doesn't come in one day.
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