On Programming Languages

Business code should never be developed using a non memory managed programming language. Being either reference counting or garbage collection (although reference counting is time predictive it can make your application more laggy and can not alone detect object cycles so garbage collection is the winner nowadays as Jamie Zawinski says). When writing business code you should not lose time managing memory when the computer can do it better for you.

The programming languages I recommend are:

• Java (for most applications including business or enterprise applications)
  
• Python (for any small application for computer administration)
  
• C/C++ (only for low level or computing intensive code)

Some other programming languages that I neither recommend nor discourage:

• JavaScript is the web browser programming language. There are alternatives like Google Web Toolkit that allows you to translate Java to JavaScript. I still have to take a look at Google Web Toolkit. The main reason I use JavaScript is because it is the browser programming language and client applications are finally settling. But JavaScript has some problems like the lack of a native (fast) function to know the length of an Associative array in contrast with Java's java.util.Map size() method and python's dictionaries len(). GWT implements java.util.HashMap with its own implementation in JavaScript instead of using its own maps because there is no fast size() function. What other people think about JavaScript.
  
• PHP is a specialized programming language for web applications that is currently powering huge sites like Facebook, Flickr and Wikipedia. It still lacks unicode support among other things, but it is quite easy to deploy since most commercial web application servers support PHP. As a weak typed programming language you may get lots of problems like PHP's handling of numeric values in strings. Anyway PHP has lots of design errors so you may want to skip it for any important website. PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter. I just do not use PHP because I do not feel safe with a weak typed language and so many design errors.
  
• Ruby with its Ruby on Rails and great OO syntax it is a language that might have a bright future. It was used for sites like Twitter but ruby on rails has scalability problems that make it not ready for large sites. Twitter changed its core from Ruby to Scala. Ruby 1.8 lacks a bytecode interpreter, Ruby 1.9 transition will take some time as there are important changes and lacks Unicode support. These Ruby problems might get fixed in the future, but right now Ruby's not ready.
  
• C# is a Java clone so it is also quite a good alternative but lacks lots of opensource frameworks to base your software on. So it is only an option if you do not mind the Microsoft only lock-in.
  

I do not like scripting languages because I want my code to work flawlessly and not compiled programming languages do not allow me to catch any error at compile time.