quote evolution

[waider]

Once upon a time I said

You're definitely in trouble when you look at a text parsing problem and think, "this would be easier in Emacs Lisp".

Having considered this, and also watching two different people flail with problems in two different languages, I have concluded that the quote can be generalised to

You're definitely in trouble when you look at a $domain problem and think, "this would be easier in $language"

with suitable values inserted for the quote-user's particular problem/bias. Examples are "mail-sending, SQL", "video-editing, Fortran" (note that these are real examples, and the former's mine, and yes I did).