Well, my "specialty" if you could call it that, is QA automation, writing automated test scripts for the system under test. So I would not consider myself a "su

Well, my "specialty" if you could call it that, is QA automation, writing automated test scripts for the system under test. So I would not consider myself a "super hacker" by any extent. My current job is writing in 4-Test, the language of Borland Silk. Before that, I did mainly unit testing development, some JUnit and XMLUnit, but primarily CPPUnit, the c++ port of JUnit. In unit testing especially one is cogniscent of what objects are in play at any given point, since one is writing a class or a method to test a certain set of objects in the system under test. So I think one becomes very aware of memory-related issues. I found the hard way writing in CPPUnit that it is easy to "trash memory" if one isn't careful. That said, I think I prefer CPPUnit, and C++ generally, for the very reason of the "tough love" it has by not having an in-built garbage collector like java has. It requires a bit more of one's attention, but frankly at the end of the day it executed swimmingly. So, with admittedly my limited perspective from the test automation world, I would personally have to vote for programming languages and approaches that force memory, and thereby performance, attention and efficiency. It is something like linux. Before I learned linux commands by playing around with cygwin, I much prefered DOS since it was more familiar. But once I learned to love talking to my computer via the cygwin shell, I never went back! Thus with writing de-constructors, once you get into the habit of it, you can't ever go back to not doing it! :-)