Yes, you quite often see facepalm solutions. For example, In the java world, they cooked up something called 'ant' which was a description in xml that would be

Yes, you quite often see facepalm solutions. For example, In the java world, they cooked up something called 'ant' which was a description in xml that would be parsed and interpreted by a java program to do all kinds of shell stuff (like creating directories, moving files, compiling files, ....). Obviously, this is a poor man's interpreter, and python would have been a better choice, or probably something like make, or scons, or whatever. I'm not doing java anymore, but I'm pretty sure some people still use it. Anyway, I've seen people opening sockets in Prolog, and I've seen people doing artificial intelligence in C. It's not about optimization, but it's surely possible to pick the wrong language for a task.