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Paul Graham has a fantastic essay on "beating the averages", where he argues that Lisp is a better language to use for programming than a "Blub" language. "Blub" languages are safe choices made by middle managers in large companies who don't know better. At Paul Graham's startup - Viaweb, their team was able to run circles around the competition, because Lisp made them 10X productive compared to other "blubby" startups. Note that these observations were made based on experiences accumulated in 1997. There were no specialized DSLs for web-app writing (Ruby on Rails). So they hand to hand-roll everything. I can see why the Lisp advantage was huge back then.

Hacker News had a recent poll on your "Favorite Programming Language". C# showed up as the 4th language behind Python, Ruby, Javascript. The discussion thread on the poll had top rated comments talking about what people like about C# 4 and 5 features. 

This surprised many including DHH. His snarky tweet below with certain amount of ridicule. 

DHH was perhaps complaining more about Microsoft and closed source nature of things than C# itself. You can see the conversation with John Sheehan in later tweets.

I found this whole thing quite funny. I'll posit that all evolving languages are getting more "functional" and are slowly evolving towards Lisp. As Paul Graham wrote in another essay, why not directly use Lisp instead of a language which slowly is getting there. I think its a matter of legacy and experience. The downtime to get productive in a new language and write production code in it is high, especially if you are running a startup. But what of the Lisp 10X advantage? I am not sure whether that's true in 2012. There's a ton of library support out there for Ruby, Python, Java and C#, which I am not sure if Lisp has.[1] All these languages have great support for writing web-apps. Some are better than others (Depends on who you ask), but I think the 10X gap may not be true [2]. 

Takeaway: Use PHP for all I care, ship stuff already.

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The best thing to do of course is ignore all this BS and focus on doing work that matters - like getting more customers and traction. This brings me to the next point:

ClearTax which lets you file your Income Tax Return online runs on ASP.NET MVC 3. We write most code in C#. We might be India's largest site running on the Microsoft's MVC stack. We are extremely seasonal though, so you can displace us. [3]

Microsoft: Make us poster boys, do some coverage of ClearTax and document our experiences with Azure, Appharbor and just generally being awesome. [4]

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[1] Clojure might be a happy choice. Java libraries and you can write in Lisp. :-)

[2] The new kids on the block are doing Node.JS by the way. 

[3] Why .NET? We started our life as a desktop application. As a Windows application, the clear choice for us at the time was .NET. Anyone arguing otherwise, should be using Python!  I am fairly language agnostic (I use perl, Python, Ruby, F#, C, JAVA depending on need and context). I try to do the exercises of SICP book when I get time. 

[4] So if you know of people inside Microsoft, tell them that these guys in New Delhi are creating good stuff using their stack. ;-)