We have discussed software development, programming languages, and methodologies here on this list. For those interested, this might be an interesting talk: http://vimeo.com/9270320, with the bit thrown in at the end about Trotskyism, politics and such.
One interesting thing that the speaker mentions, which has been covered in the past (I think Yegge or some other tech ranter had a blog post), is the amazing fact that the number of lines of code correlates (inversely in this case) better than every other metric that has been used to estimate the quality of software (by quality I mean the rate of bugs, etc). An important thing to consider when considering vendors (for-profit or not) of toolkits, frameworks, platforms and languages (except in every development environment I have been a part of, it has never been a criteria nor a concern — the more complex and verbose the toolset the greater the enthusiasm; I suspect it’s about job security :-)).
—ravi