Link: Joel on Software discusses the languages that matter. According to Joel, there are three and a half:
The safe answer, for the Big Enterprisy Thing where you have no interest in being on the cutting edge, is C#, Java, PHP, or Python, since there’s so much evidence that when it comes right down to it zillions of people are building huge business-critical things in those languages and while they may have problems, they’re not life-threatening problems.
How do you decide between C#, Java, PHP, and Python? The only real difference is which one you know better. If you have a serious Java guru on your team who has build several large systems successfully with Java, you’re going to be a hell of a lot more successful with Java than with C#, not because Java is a better language (it’s not, but the differences are too minor to matter) but because he knows it better. Etc.
He completely skips over Perl, which I suppose is just as well, but the riotously unintentionally funny part of Joel’s post is how he mentions, almost as an afterthought, that his actual product is built using a proprietary language his team built in-house. Hard core!
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Yeah, I (obviously) noted the Perl thing, because Perl’s unquestionably running a lot more infrastructure than Python is. But the proprietary language thing just seems like a bad idea.
Maybe it’s just the kind of bad idea you can indulge in when you have a boutique. You wanna write the compare/contrast for 37signals vs. Fog Creek? :)