What is the best programming language for batch processing ?
I would like to know what is the best database/OS independent programming language for batch processing (heavy volume, heavy database operations and computations, no user interface) of a financial application? In good old days, ‘C’ would have been my choice but with the change of IT industry perception, there are practical problems to get good ‘C’ resources. Among modern day languages – Java, PHP, C#, Perl, Ruby etc, which one is better for batch processing (more than 15 million transactions) while ensuring: a) the code is database and OS independent b) excellent performance c) the code is linearly scalable d) lower total cost of ownership (hardware cost and future support).