There was a guy in our university tutorial support group (a PHD grad) who, in the first session said, "I only do C, Im your speed guy".<p>We all hacked around with other languages and implementations. And when we needed some fast and efficient little "thing"  to plug in we went to the "C guy".<p>He was by far the most important guy for all the teams there :) (save me countless hours in writing a non-crucial but useful optimized array sorting algorithm to work with our program)