 gary lawrence murphy said i envy some of those posting to this list i ve been in business for NUMBER years and i haven t yet had the luxury of writing every line of code for any project we are always coerced by budgets and time to maximize the amount of work done elsewhere for consultancy integration or open source work sure perl python or java with free use of external libs makes a lot of sense imo i should note that normally when i ve used c or c in the past it s dictated by the fact that i would be working on a commercial product written from the ground up where the code you re generating is important ip for the company in this case using a third party lib often is not an option or would be a pita licensing wise also cutting out third party dependencies can reduce the risk of oops there goes the company that makes that library i depend on now to shop around for something vaguely similar figure out what bugs it s got rewrite my code to use the new api and hope for the best this can be a very big deal for obvious reasons open source knockers should note that this is not a problem when using lgpl d libs j 