[amm]

> I've had first-hand experience of how technology choices affect companies and it can be very painful down the road.

I've had the same experience. A couple of years ago we decided to implement a rather large part of a project in JRuby (the other part was written in Java), because it seemed to be the right tool for the job: a scripting language that can interoperate with java libraries out of the box.

In retrospect it was a bad decision, because the interpreter error messages were (are?) cryptic (at least compared to what you get with Java) and IDE integration was really, really bad. Cross-language re-factoring was broken and we ended up unit testing almost every line of JRuby code to make sure we didn't introduce regressions when making changes to running systems.

There's a part in Peopleware (http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-2...) where the authors describe that the choice of programming language has almost no impact on the success of a project. So why add additional risk when there's no proven benefit?

Edit: Also, people always argue that they can get things done much faster in "esoteric" languages, but forget about the time spent on maintenance, bug fixing, explaining code to new colleagues, ...