I'd personally say perl, if most of his stuff is going to be just messing with databases and data in a database, especially if a lot of the stuff is in strings, C will be hell. I've usually found scripting languages to be more useful for stuff like this, since speed isn't a top priority (It should be fast enough for pretty much anything but heavy math operations dealing with huge blobs of data) and they tend to be able to produce something quicker and easier but still of quality.

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Isn't that the case of almost any language where you rely on a garbage collector, and you're just able to lose pointers and references all you want? Also, I think you misused "dereference". Are you referring to just losing all references to a piece of data, or retrieving the data pointed to by the reference?

It is convenient to be able to do stuff like:

SomeClass.method1(OtherClass.method6(AnotherClass.Method12341234());

and not have to worry about cleaning up whatever the last 2 methods returned, and don't really see anything terribly wrong with that usage assuming a good garbage collector. I don't know the deep details of Java, so I don't know what would create boatloads of temporary objects. I suppose a lot of string operations at once could result in a ton of temporary objects, though, and of course a lot of methods involving Collections probably can create 2n or n^2 temporary objects in some bad situations, where n is the size of the collection.

And you're right about Java with the way it's future is determined. It's mostly a corporate, money-making language. Fast development, easy, doesn't even need to be good, just needs to be able to work as cheaply as possible. Then your employees have to deal with the crap and can't say anything about it because they don't know any better or they just don't want to lose their job. Or even worse, you make some specialized something-or-other, or you just have a monopoly on some product that your customers have to eat and have no other option, so you can make it as shitty as possible, and in most of the cases, they do. :/

...but that's enough anti-corporate ranting from me in this thread, for now at least. :p

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