First, thank you for taking the time to elaborate. Many people either don't or feel that being asked to elaborate is somehow insulting.

Your question regarding "business-readiness" or "business-capable-ness" of a language is very relevant. How a language is viewed within the business community determines why someone would choose to master the language. For example, I want to learn Lisp. However, I need to master other languages (like Javascript) first to pay the bills, and Lisp is a language I can only learn in my spare time.

You refer to that yourself, when you say I think it is related to "If many people in other companies use it then it is ok to use it". And, I'm not sure that this is a good metric to follow, if you want your company to grow. It's a good metric if you want to merely keep up with the Joneses.

Paul Graham speaks about this in several of his essays, particularly the ones he wrote about Viaweb, his company that build a Lisp virtual storefront (now YahooStores). He felt that the only way to be the Best-of-Breed was to not do what everyone else was doing. There's more risk in this path, but there is no reward without risk. And, as a real-world example, Google requires its programmers to know Python. I think it's the only major company that has Python as a required language in all its developer postings. Amazon requires Mason/mod_perl and Yahoo requires Perl. Yet, it's accepted wisdom among CTOs that Java is the only language worth developing new projects in. Who is right? Maybe, one should reject the accepted wisdom on technology when the wise don't actually use the technologies themselves.

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

In reply to Re^3: Business readiness of programming languages by dragonchild
in thread Business readiness of programming languages by szabgab

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