It's difficult for me to get out of the habit of using whatever tool I've been working with at the moment to solve any problem that comes up. (Usually, that means C and Perl.) When I can break out of that rut, though, very good things happen.

For instance, a while ago I was handed a fairly nasty data munging problem (I can't recall the specifics, so this story may sound pretty vague; my apologies). Naturally, I first attacked it with Perl. It wasn't responding well to the attempts I made at solving it, and I was getting pretty frustrated. In a fit of right-brained brilliance, I realized that, if I only had the data in a DB, it would take but one line of SQL to solve the problem. Five minutes later, I was done.

This is one major advantage to having a reasonably broad knowledge of the field: other solutions are constantly bubbling and percolating just behind your subconscious. Sometimes, they escape; sometimes, they're better than what you've been hacking on for the last hour.

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The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
/msg me if you downvote this node, please.
:wq