Well, in my country (Argentina) C++ programmers are the geeks of geeks in our software industry. Pretty much every job around is for for JE22, VB, and at most, some _old_ C/C++ for some legacy systems. In these lands, being a booster means close to nothing (to the Industry)... I even feel that the same nothing would mean to be, say, a commitee member :-) I'm afraid that C++ is largely _percieved_ as esoteric, complicated and unworthty worldwide. For more than a year I've been professionally coding only in C# just becasue the team I got involved into, based in the US, prefered to stay away from C++. I've been trying to dilude all those fears and maybe, if we were to start from scratch, we could do it C++, but when I joined C++ was like black magic. Similarly, about a year ago I joined a worldwide team (with people mostly in the US and Europe) that intended to develop _games_ in anything but C++ (can you believe it!). They purposedly insisted on avoiding C++, pretty much all of them! I tried and tried to bring them to their senses, by showing them that this particular industry was born from C an beyond, but it was fruitless.. but, well, they picked Delphi, even over C# and besides my strong suggestion, so what can I say... Before I quit my old job, about two years ago, we looked for a replacement... we seeked for many months, until we got tired of trying to get someone with some degree of _modern_ C++ knowledge... none of the "senior C++ programmers" interviewed knew about Boost, or at most they merely heard of it but never really used it... eventually, we got to the ONLY one person who at least really knew about STL... but it took us months to find him!! [I know all this is OT but I think is nice to raise the head up for a minute and see that we're a rare niche] Fernando Cacciola