Righ, as a consultant, I had to deal with similar requests for 'enhancements' and other 'gotta-haves'. I had also spent some time working for a small .com firm back when it was all hipe and glory. Luckily, my boss too was quite aware of what it takes for a program to work properly as he had a PhD in Comp. Science. This helped me alot as I didn't have to explain a lot of dirty details of my trade.

Nontheless, I feel that it is equally challenging to communicate with those who have no ground knowledge in 'programming' and those who by far and wide exceed your own skills in the field. In the case of my previous boss, at times he seemed to percieve a task to be overly simplistic whereas it turned out to be quite a task in the end, for me at least ;). However, whenever I had to talk to my boss, I was always careful to reassure him that a project will go smoothly as even at the time of a major setback, as a developer I know the word 'learn'. Throughout my short career as a developer, I have learnt that it doesn't hurt to learn new things to complete your job faster and right. Be it Perl, C/C++, or even Pascal, all are good to use for various purposes.

With this in mind, I hardly ever deny a request for a certain feature or piece of code despite of the fact I may require to learn something new to complete the job. I guess I'm at odds with wil on that point. I feel that when I'm hired to work for a company as a developer, it may be somewhat damaging to basically go about trying to explain other co-workers that you are in certain ways 'inadequate' for a job/project. You should never as a developer limit yourself to the use of only one tool, be it 'Perl' or something else. For one, this 'revalation' may be ground to your replacement with a new developer that would have knowledge of the tool you are familiar with and more.

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