>>16
I use it to write complex applications while still maintaining reasonable performance. A recent program I've written was only some 2000 lines long and performed a variety of rather complex tasks, a lot of which were desribed in a compact DSL which was compiled into real code, which was much larger than the description code. If I were to have used something like Java or C# to do the same task, I estimate 10k times if I'm lucky, and if I would have used C, I might have squeezed it in 10-20k lines, however the flexibility would have had to suffer (C tends to force me to make premature optimizations all the time, and if I force myself not to make those optimizations, my code ends up being a lot more complicated and I have to track a lot more things myself), and chances are the C and Java implementations would have been interpreted instead of compiled, so they would have been slower. (my CL tool processes about a hundred megabytes of source code within a few seconds. I've had speedups of 1000%+ by mostly performing algorithmic changes, instead of microptimizations. Compiler-related microoptimizations were also performed, however, with a good compiler they usually don't yeild much more than some 20-30% speedup).
so the tl;dr here is that I'm very happy with the language that I'm using and the power it gives me. I can code a lot and still afford to be lazy as fuck.