working on a big social network, what is the most efficient programming language to use ?

Question

am collecting information to support the re-search that will help to decide which is the best programming language for my project, a team of 4 different experiment developers will start working on a new complex social network, so am looking for the language that will fit my project.

1) the project is divided into modules, that will be developed sectionally so, the scalability of the project is Extra important.

2) we expecting multi-thouthand hit by a day so, we should have a good performance, and a good host for the project.

3) our team is experience with PHP, .NET and the time they need to learn new thing is important

until now, i can see that Rails 3 is the best out there for such a project. so what do you think guys ?

Answer 1

give a try to django... performs as hell!

http://www.djangoproject.com/

Answer 2

I'd go with php, i run a rather large community and the only thing that never gave a problem is php.

Of course some supporting tool is necessary see, APC, memcached etc.

Easy, fast, plenty of good libraries, for me it's a no brainer.

if you are choosing a programming language for his performance at this point (0 users) you probably are pre-optimizing and that has been said that isn't good.