I really dislike java for being almost as proprietary as ASP, I'd prefer Perl over Java any day even though there is no OO model, but my choice of a very, very versatile language is Python, it is more versatile than PHP, Perl and Java, allows for crazy unimaginable stuff like loading C libraries within a python program, is a better multi operating system language and is better synthax-wise... But for web stuff, there is nothing faster than PHP, both execution times, and Database anything times, also supports more database database interfaces natively than Java and ASP combined
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