Story

I'm a Java developer for internal applications. There's nothing wrong with the language itself, but it's on its way out. Unfortunately there is too much instability when it comes to what people THINK Oracle is going to do with it. My corp. moved to java over a decade ago because it was free, available, cross platform and easy to learn. It looked like it would be supported well into the future. Then Oracle bought out Sun and now there's speculation that Oracle wants to split Java into "paid for" and "free" meaning there's a good chance anyone not paying for it are going to end up with an incomparable poorly supported version. Those doing the major development, like my company, will be forced into paying tens of thousands a year in licensing only to have to deal with supporting the people using our software under the "free" version. There's also the fear that Oracle will do what they do with their other products and split things out into separate modules with confusing license agreements. You'll end up needing everything and the licensing will be unclear. Make one bad decision, or include an unlicensed module you have access to, but aren't paying for, and Oracle will sue you into oblivion for licensing violations.

So of course with that expectation, we're planning for the worse case and have recently started training developers in several different languages to try and find one that might be a suitable replacement going forward. Ruby, Python and R our our top three choices at the moment. We're also looking at how difficult it'll be to provide software through web applications.