>>The problem is the day they ask any of those guys to make a grid to display the data, to publish a web service interface and add a transaction login, they'll probably quote 10K, 100K and a million (respectively), and 2 months, 6 months, and 2 years (respectively), while you know you can do all this in a day or two, for a couple hundred bucks.
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>Your argument impresses me. Perhaps the C++ path is viable only for non-gui algorithms.

Well, not quite so. If you really have a bunch of libraries already built, and you're very proficient, you actually can do RAD in C++, or even in Assembler. Most of the time, though, it takes longer, due to the need to do a lot more checking.

Developing in C++ gives you a lot more control and plenty of room for optimization (this is what's called low level), but it also makes a lot more room for fatal errors.

Groet,