[gecko]

.NET on Unix can be a really pleasant experience, to be honest (I'm even working on a blog post.NET on Unix), but as much as I think it could be awesome for a start-up, I do not currently believe that it's a viable option for a conservative enterprise. Right now, we're going through a heretofore unprecedented deluge of open-source .NET libraries, and along with that has come a massive spike in Mono-compatible frameworks, but it's still a bit of an uphill struggle if you're coming from the Mono side. MonoDevelop is no VisualStudio, for example, and while NuGet runs fine on Unix, you miss out on all the pieces that integrate with solution files. I am optimistic you could pick .NET for Unix in a year or two for super-conservative corporate development, but I get your requirements, and regretfully believe you're making the only viable decision right now.

[kibwen]

Thanks for the candid reply.

I am optimistic you could pick .NET for Unix in a year or two

This really resonates with me. I feel like there's been a language boom in the past few years, but few implementations yet have the maturity and stability that I'd expect in a corporate environment. Given enough time and continued interest in alternative languages, I'd bet that Java's grip on this market will likely continue to erode (though an outright slide into obscurity seems highly unlikely). If it were ten years from now, perhaps I'd even be considering Go for this space.