I've been programming in different languages for over 20 years. I remember the days when one had to pay $5000 for Fortran on VMS. The days when everyone one had custom data and configuration file formats that required endless tedious documentation in order for anyone to use the format.
Things are different now. CPU's have the power to allow ASCII format of any kind to be feasible for config and data storage. We have cheap programming languages and numerous options when applying a language to a task.
Now I'm writing a real-time database. We have so much data that storage in ASCII is not an alternative. Fortunately, there is the freely available HDF5 format.
Our users want their data loaded into MS Office tools. I wish they supported HDF5, but a suitable alternative is that they support both HTML and XML.
When I consider how much work technologies such as HDF5 and XML saves me in terms of compatiblity with other peoples' software, I am extremely thankful that these "standards" exist. I've never used Python. My expertise is in C++ and Perl. I love scripting languages. I'm sure I would love Python. But if I had to give up one of the technologies I have available for my tasks today, I would give up Perl. I have waited too long for standard file formats to be so popular and with so much free support, even to the point that Bill Gates must conform, that I never want to go back to the way things were.
By the way, I developed a set of C++ classes that slurp up XML files into data structures that are very similar to Perl data structures. C++ is so powerful that with the right classes, many of the advantages of a scripting language are attainable.
As for C++, I certainly do not agree. I spent 6 years programming in C++, and though Java seemed to me to be only an incremental improvement, REXX and then Python came as such a breath of fresh air that I cannot imagine how I programmed in such a straitjacket before. I tried just about every class library under the sun, and nothing even comes within miles of approaching the flexibility and productivity of dynamic languages.
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