Kevin Lee Asks:

Is Java still considered "the language" for speed, robustness and scalability, or are coders moving to new languages like RoR?

My Response:

Superstars coders are those that can bring a myriad of tools to any problem and the experience to know which tool is going to be best for the job. Experience and fluency are key to making the right language decisions.

I think Java is looked at as a great Enterprise language because you can bring many programmers into a project and the language requires a particular style of work flow that makes it easier for large scale collaboration.

If you are looking at rapid prototyping, RoR allows you to build a web 2.0 site in an afternoon, but if you actually have a successful endeavor (a recent example is twitter.com) you will most likely have major scaling problems as the interaction between database and code has been obfuscated for speed of design not efficiency.

Elaborating on David Moore's comment on programmers being polyglots, most projects now require that multiple languages are used. I am currently working on a community centered website where web pages are built in PHP but all most interaction with the users is done with AJAX and many design actions are accomplished through Javascript.

Even then Language that is chosen for each component still only solves half of the issue -- without proper database design or in my latest project the use of memcache there is no language or hardware that can handle heavy load.