title: High-traffic, Highly-secure web API, what language?
body: <p>If you were planning on building a high-traffic, very secure site what language would you use?  </p>
  
  <p>For example, if you were planning on say building an authorize.net-scale site, that had to handle tons of credit card transactions via an API, what would you use building it from scratch?  I would imagine that most sites handling similar traffic with similar security would use non open-source software (correct me if I'm wrong).  What open source software would you use and why?  Python, Ruby, Erlang, PHP, custom C/C++, or what?  Also, would you use a traditional database, or does the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL" rel="noreferrer">NoSQL</a> route make more sense?</p>
  
  <p>Not trying to start a flame-war here, just wondering what the good people of Stack Overflow think on the subject...</p>
  
  <p>Update:
  As a bit of a clarification, this is entirely hypothetical.  I fully understand the importance of knowing your language/platform, just looking for some opinions of strengths/weaknesses of a given language/framework and where (and why) one might be more suitable over another.  As far as data goes, I'm thinking customer A bought items X, Y, and Z, from vendor B.  So, pretty straightforward, until someone wants to know whether customer C also bought items X and Y or X and Z or Y and Z together in one purchase.  So, from a data standpoint, I guess I'm looking at it from a business intelligence standpoint and wondering whether NoSQL has any advantages/disadvantages over a traditional SQL database.</p>