So, last week, I was talking to some people about Groove application development (not unusual), and we were debating development languages. Right now I'm using JavaScript by default: it's easy to debug, and I'm part of a huge group of people who have built enough DHTML to become very acclimatised to JavaScript's weirdness (eg. the prototype-based function/class stuff, which makes inheritance a royal pain but makes functional programming dangerously easy). Nevertheless, it's not likely to be my long-term platform, and nor is Visual Basic ('orrible, ugly, despicable), nor C++ (all the templating stuff passed me by a long while ago), nor Java (much though I love the language and respect J2EE). COM is an important interface structure, and for Groove I need something which works with that. C# is almost the default choice at this stage.
There's another, though: Python.
C# seems really quite elegant (well of course, given that many of the ideas came from Java and they'll have bypassed all that AWT-vs-Swing drear...), and I know just from a cursory glance that the learning curve will be smooth and seductive. But it's part of the development kit from a company which not only appears to own much of America, but also gets away with monstrously explicit bait-and-switch such as J#. Of course Microsoft are impossible to ignore. I'd just rather not be in their pocket.
Python, on the other hand, is still a foreign country to me. Should have dug into Zope properly several years ago when I had the chance. Still, it's now properly on the agenda. (Just as soon as I can clear the decks a little here...)