I am a Software Developer since a long time and whenever I was changing programming language and environment I usually felt getting something better.

Nowadays - e.g. reading threads here - I see a big problem that there are a lot of languages but no language is providing the big advantage in all important realms. You have to think about the language to use for every single project. I often read that depending on the project needs one has to choose the language.

I am really not satisfied with this as I know very well that nobody can have the same level on each language and the language you use for the every day work will be the only one where you are really productive with.

As the projects I am working on may be very different I need to use a programming language that offers high flexibility.

For the last year my focus was on Visual Basic under Win****. As for my home PC I have kicked it and using FC5 now and as also at work I have to do more with linux than 5 years ago, the plattform independence of the programming language is getting important for me (it actually IS important for me).

I do database access and GUI design (so I need an efficient IDE) as well as I had to interact a lot with foreign components in the past (COM and maybe more .NET in the future). I do no driver development or something very near to the OS. My focus are end-user and batch application as well as some web-development.

I tried a little Java and a little .NET (hoping for compatibility on Linux with Mono) also some first steps I did also with Python.
And in the last weeks I thought also about returning to C(++) which I used a lot many years ago under MS-DOS.

.NET/Mono to me seems too less platform independent - as everything from M$ must be ported to mono step by step to be compatible.

Java for me seems the "cleaner" thing from technical design and I like the "true" platform independence of the language but designing GUI was quite awful because of some instabilities at my last attempts and currently I either do not remember what packages I had to download to make everything work in eclipse. I am missing here the all-included-package and I don't know how I will be affected on performance critical batch operations.

For python I am not sure - the default IDE is poor and even SPE seems not to be the killer IDE. Libraries seem to be quite well organized.

Should I go back to C? I remember that everything must be done by hand and the problem with the needed header files (now used to COM).

As I cannot dive deep into all those languages I need to make a decision where to go. But I really do not know which will be the best choice. I need an alrounder language.

What have you chosen and why?

I don't believe that there is an all rounder language but for me C++ with the QT library does a fairly good job for multi-platform GUI and database development.

I certainly wouldn't want to use C++ for web site design and whilst I understand your concern about not being able to master all the languages I feel that it is possible to be good enough with a few to be productive across the spectrum. At the moment I tend to focus my energies on C++ (with QT) and PHP.

graeme.

Perl is a pretty good all-round lang: see here for web / CGI.
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/stein/

Also here for full documentation/examples: http://perldoc.perl.org/ and here for deep qns: http://www.perlmonks.com/