Given the choice, I'd probably program mostly in Perl. It's a nice featureful idiomatic language, without peer for text munging (and 99% of my programs are text munging) and pretty good for most everything else.

The major problem with Perl is that it's slow. (Yeah, yeah, programmer time vs. computer time, but if you have a ten-minute cron window and your script takes 15, you have a more serious problem.) For problems that require the speed of a language compiled to machine code by an optimizing compiler, I'd probably use Common LISP or Scheme. I haven't yet decided which I like more. Wonderful, comfortable languages, the both of them, once you get over your fear of parentheses. For most problems, they're about as quick to program in as Perl, sometimes better, sometimes worse. As usual, it's a matter of knowing the idioms, having a toolchest, and being comfortable with the language.

If I have to write super-fast, low-level code, I'll use C, or maybe carefully-written C++ for an especially large project. C also seems to be the great common denominator of the hacking world: you're pretty much guaranteed that any even vaguely experienced programmer knows C, and that any even vaguely sane system has a C compiler installed. If these points are important to me, I'll probably use C. It sometimes feels like a step backwards coming from one of the languages I mentioned above, but once I've gotten into the swing of the language I do pretty well.

I know (with varying degrees of familiarity) plenty of other languages: 80x86, 68k, and MIPS assembly languages, Haskell (fun!), Prolog (everyone should learn at least a little bit of Prolog), Pascal, and Java are the first that come to mind. They all have their plusses (well, maybe not x86 asm or Pascal :-), but in general, to solve an immediate, real-world problem, I'll pick one of the above.

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