I’m sorry did I miss the point where we started caring again about what language we are writing in. This was a discussion point 5 years ago when we didn’t have powerful IDEs to help us write applications. Now it should be “what job do I want to get done?” and “what technology is going to deliver that the quickest, cheapest and highest quality output?
By technology I think there are at least four key areas to look at:
- Skills availability (who’s going to write the code)
- Framework (.NET, Rails etc)
- Tools (VS, Eclipse etc)
- Language (Java, VB.NET, C#, Ruby)
And imho you shouldn’t make a decision based on one of these factors alone. Particularly in Australia atm where getting skilled developers in nearly any technology is proving very difficult.
Unlike Alex I don’t much care for C# or Ruby for that matter. I find that despite being more verbose VB.NET is still my preference but again this doesn’t mean I will always pick it for the job.