What business are you in? As far as I can tell Java is probably the number 1 language when it comes to businesses use. Don't take my word for it look at the job listings in your area.

It's a new project. I want to dump mostly just tweets into a database for warehouse purposes. No functionality will read from them, I just need it for my own analytics, so I can query and explore in depth. Aggregates will be persisted somewhere (maybe a relational).

I might've missed it but is there a reason you don't write the censor data to a file on the filesystem? Most logging frameworks support rolling based on file size. Then have a script that transforms and loads the data where ever you want. I would recommend you look at OpenTSB for a data store.

While the syntax is similar lambda expression are not just syntactic sugar for anonymous inner classes. I recommend you watch this talk from Brian Goetz the architect of Java. I linked to the relevant time stamp where he addresses your question.

If your primary goal is to get a job I recommend you ditch VB (or at least substitute C# if possible) and concentrate on C++ and Java. Those two languages together make up a giant portion of the job market (maybe more than all the other languages you listed combined).

There's nothing wrong with ASP or C#. As a matter of fact I think both of those choices on a purely technical basis are superior to what reddit is running. The only problem I see in terms of scaling out is the data store which is MSSQL. However MSSQL can go a pretty long way before it needs to be replaced with some NoSQLy AP thing like Cassandra.

Why do you think Rails (ruby) will scale better than C#? CLR's concurrency/gc/jit/overall speed story is superior to ruby. If you want to use Rails you better be prepared to work around the GIL. Unless you meant JRuby which implies the JVM and I really doubt that's what you meant.

Your statements about voat's code being not that complicated leads me to believe you've never written something like voat before and assume it's simple when it isn't. In my experience if code for a big project like voat looks simple it's because the creators have spent a lot of time and effort thinking about design and organization of the code base coupled with an understanding of the problem space. "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

I would expect C#'s garbage collector to be superior to GHC's or any other platform outside of the JVM. The reason is simple, man centuries of optimization by a corporation that has the money to hire the best. Then again I haven't seen many papers talking about Haskell's GC.

There is not right answer but my personal preference is: Calculator::distance and Carshop::paintjob. I like Point and Car classes to be immutable data and have functions operate on the data. In fact I think Carshop should return a new Car instance. This approach translates nicely to F#

I would recommend you look at Java's BigInteger. Internally it's an array of ints.