My company has two teams, knowledge engineers and software engineers. The knowledge engineers build prototypes in either Lisp or Perl which are eventually transformed into efficient C/C++ code by the software engineers.

Usually I try to keep in mind that someone has to port my code at some stage, so I tend to avoid writing code that is too Perlish. Of course it happens that I forget and start using Perl idioms that are more difficult to translate.

Currently one of the software engineers is porting a particular piece of code which is simple in Perl, but non-trivial in C. Realizing this I asked him whether it was not too hard and his answer was pretty nice: "Well, each statement is a bit of a challenge, but understanding it prepares me for the next one, which is just a bit harder."

Note that our software engineers are very good at their job (and none read PerlMonks).

Just something from daily experience, -gjb-