I was wondering when somebody was going to mention the MonsantoSoft monoculture aspect of all this. As convenient as it may be for brain dead powers that be to all do the exact same thing, it's a bad idea for socient from a safety / engineering-redundancy (reliability) aspect.

Diversity is good for software, plants and animals in the long run.

Agreed. The JVM does an decent job, and C# has some pretty nice syntactic conveniences.

I ran a string whacking benchmark (posted on my website, roboprogs.com: "... faster ..." page), and, for a sequential task, Perl cleaned up handily. However, for the commonly available languages on *nix, Java outshone everything else for dealing with threads. Keep in mind this was a naive use of threads as well: fire up for a single task, rather than having a thread pool that looped over requests from a queue. Java still did a good job managing it.

(though I do wish Java had more alternatives for quick and dirty coding at times - weakly typed options, delegate/function pointer type stuff -- still need to look more into jRuby, Scala, Groovy, et al)

it was necessary to regulate it. Without limited effective regulation, such as requiring this stuff to be labeled, it can be hard to conduct fair, non-coerced, transactions. I am not saying we should outright ban the stuff -- what if somebody is in a situation where the choice is grow this, because nothing else will? But it would be nice to make an informed decision.

Either regulations, or de-regulation, can go overboard. What was right 10 or 20 years ago may be too much or too little now.

Any sufficiently advanced monopoly is indistinguishable from communism. Some guys in a room on the central planning committee decide production for an entire industry, and see to it that there are no questions from the populace.