Sadly, there's a difference between how 'clean' or nice the language is, and the "real life" use and deployment. Deploying Ruby for example is an absolute vers

Sadly, there's a difference between how 'clean' or nice the language is, and the "real life" use and deployment. Deploying Ruby for example is an absolute versioning and compatability disaster in my opinion. You almost immediately _require_ sandboxing, which on it's own requires using 3rd party tools. Deploying a Ruby program ends up to be quite a bit of "extra" work, more glue that can fail. I'm not saying PHP is better, although it's not as bad anymore as it used to be, but choosing Ruby as a PHP alternative? No thanks. Choosing Java over C++ suffers from more or less the same problem, but this being that it usually relies on a server like tomcat or jboss, and even if it doesn't, it still suffers from the same problems, and requires a run-time, which is a pain in the ass to deploy properly. The other issue is that there are a LOT more stupid java developers than there are good-ones. And even good-ones apparently seem to have the illusion that memory-management and usage isn't an issue, and that you can't have memory leaks in Java. And while I prefer the java syntax and language itself over C++, the latter isn't that bad, certainly with the Boost library available, and when you keep yourself to a few strict rules, writing 'modern' C++ can be surprisingly clean and quick in both development and deployment. Not saying you can't accidentally launch a nuke and cause ww3 with C++, especially when using templates, and when using the boost libraries, link them static, you'll save yourself a whole lot of trouble :) Anyway, for a lot of these options, I'd just say "Python", which is readily available on most systems, and mostly 'just works'. In the list, Python would be my replacement for Perl, PHP/Ruby, Tcl and Shell. Perl's problems are simple: pretty dated by now, and more 'quick hacks' ends up in production than I'd like, while nobody knows exactly anymore what they do, and nobody feels like touching the code "because it works". Prolog and Lisp I wouldn't even touch for real-world usage, and I'm not familiar enough with functional programming languages to consider Erlang or Haskell as "the best tool for the job" for any problem I've encountered. Disclaimer: I'm a developer writing in C/C++/Java/Python, who has more than touched Objective C/Ruby/PHP/Perl/bash scripting/C#/..., and who is also maintaining a linux server infrastructure. These opinions have been formed over years from own and other people's experiences, and oh did they change. For example, I first liked Ruby, but then it bit me in the ass. I don't understand why all these 'new' projects, which clearly show 'the way to go', like Puppet, Chef, Logstash, ... are all using Ruby for some reason.