Christopher Sahnwaldt

Although Pascal was my first love, Java is in many ways the best programming language I know.

Michael Kay, the author of the best Java XSLT processor (Saxon) and a large part of the XSLT specification, also wrote the best books on the subject. Very accessible, very precise, very thorough.

XML didn't live up to its expectations, but I still like it.

SQL is useful. What else can I say?

After the initial excitement wore off, I feel that Scala is not as huge an improvement over Java as it's made out to be (especially since Java 8 introduced lambdas), and Scala has a few disadvantages: compilation often takes much longer and is less incremental, and some language features can actually lead to reduced code quality.

I once had to work with Zope and didn't like it, but Python was love at first sight. I never had an opportunity to build large Python applications though.

MySQL was the first SQL database I worked with, and it's still my favorite, although I also enjoyed working with PostgreSQL and Derby. Oracle is an old-fashioned (but powerful) monster.