I’m a UNIX-based developer and since 2000 I have been working mainly with Java and then JVM languages. When Java 7 slipped I made no real secret of the fact that Java was in a lot of trouble. The post-Oracle world though looks even worse with a lack of clarity of what in the core ecosystem is free, open source and liability free.
Clojure and to a less extent Scala are great steps forward so I don’t feel the burning need for a Java 7/8 whatever. However a moribund or tainted JVM is a major problem and so I’m now thinking about what the post-Java escape route looks like. On the web front it is pretty obvious, Python and Ruby are great languages with great frameworks for developing web-based application. For the server-side heavy lifting it is a lot less clear, people are talking about Google Go but that does feel quite low-level, I’m not sure I’m ready to go back to pointer wrangling even with memory-management. It feels like something you’d build a tool out of not an application. Mono feels like more of the same problems of wrestling with big companies with vested interests, if you are going to do that then why not try and sort out the OpenJDK?
As the title of the post suggests the language I am most inclined towards right now is Python. It is a really concise but clear language that on UNIX systems comes with an amazingly comprehensive set of libraries and which has a virtual environment and dependency management that is on a par with RVM and gem.
The single issue that comes up is performance, what I have been finding that for 80% of the work I am doing performance is okay and I’m producing a fraction of the code I would normally have to create. For that last 20% maybe I am going to have to look at something like Go or (god forbid) go back to C but I would much prefer to see a Clojure or Scala that could run on top of something like LLVM. I also have some hope of smarter people than me making progress on a JIT for Python that might take 20% down to a figure where performance would matter so much to me I wouldn’t mind sweating to make it happen.
Echo One 
Writing performance critical parts of a Python application used to imply descending to C or C++. Whilst this is still feasible, there is also Cython — the Python-like language gets compiled to C and so gives the performance but in, well, a Python-like language.
PyPy already has a JIT. Python 3 should be getting one soon.
Thanks Russel, for some reason I’ve always read Cython as CPython and never realised what it is.