A professional (I get paid to do it) software engineer for over a decade. I was an enthusiast from about the age of 8 (Basic A; "what's this do!?"), a hobbyist from about the age of 12 (my first award, "best use of comedy in programming"), and a professional at about the age of 16 (first paid gig for Radio Shack, VB DOS)... then a "real" professional at about 23 (game development in Australia, C with horrible C++).

C++ has become my language of choice for a long while now, ever since I was Origin and Microprose hacking binaries whose headers included "C/C++". I like a language that can create itself, and the OS that we use to create it.

I'm also experienced with many other languages, including Java, JavaScript, Python, VB, VBA, C#, ActionScript 2 and 3, and a large slew of meta languages.

I look at language choice like I do herbs and spices: they all have they use and place. I've also grown enough as a developer to recognize effort and production quality over complication and production quantity.