I think you are doing students and young programmers a disservice by implying that there is one "best" solution here, and that you know it. I am assuming you haven't seen the ruby or Clojure code involved, don't work at Beanstalk, don't know the skillset of their team, their budget, strategic plans, or any other one of a bunch of details that determine what is best in a particular situation. If you already know C then perhaps it would be right for you. That does not mean it is right for everyone.
> I think you are doing students and young programmers a disservice by implying that there is one "best" solution here, and that you know it.
I read their requirements in the blog post. They need fast access to SVN and Git internals to store off metadata. Based on that it's really not hard to determine what to use to solve this problem. There may not be one exact right answer (in fact, I suggested two), but there is a direction that makes sense and one that does not.
The real disservice to those coming up in this industry is reading blog post after blog post on Hacker News with people looking for "excuses" to use random languages they're interested in playing with. The answer to most of these problems is to use something really boring and straightforward, like C, C++ or Java. I guess I've worked too many places where legacy code becomes a huge burden because one guy wants to play around with X one time. The funny thing is, I see these same guys go onto the next place and do it there.
I'm failing to see why Clojure is a bad choice for this problem. It's a general-purpose programming language, just like others that you mentioned. And beyond those, it happens to have the benefits of being more expressive, testable, concise, etc.
Can you elaborate on why you think it's a bad choice?
