Actually, that problem sounds fairly well-suited to Haskell, because it's essentially a series of pure transformations. My Haskell is quite rusty, but I imagine

Actually, that problem sounds fairly well-suited to Haskell, because it's essentially a series of pure transformations. My Haskell is quite rusty, but I imagine the program would look something like: mapM_ putStrLn $ filter startsWithNum $ lines $ readFile (args !! 0) where startsWithNum = ... Still, I agree with your point -- no language can be optimal for every problem.