[tezza]

"there are a very limited number of applications that require that sort of speed"

Plenty of software is not web-based or a cron job for Linux.

Java, C# are chosen not just because of speed.

You can get vendor support from Sun for their JVM stack. You can (try to) get similar support from Microsoft for .Net stack.

Then also there are personal preferences ::

. Static Typing can be a key part of how people build complex systems in a way they feel comfortable with. When my team codes that way, may bugs are picked up at compile time versus deploy time.

. JVM has really nice remote debugging

. JVM is much closer to run-anywhere than Python

. JVM exits with hs_err files logged