Learning OOP...

[Steven Shaw]

Java is the language that best suits your requirements.

1. OOP and "business/enterprise oriented"
2. A good career move!
3. Code reuse - I guess so
4. Debugging tools - free IDEs JBuilder and Forte
5. Strong typing no generics - use GJ for generics in Java
6. Java is pretty easy to learn - a no brainer. Perhaps
   not quite as easy to earn as Python.
7. Reduced development times could come from Java's
   automated garbage collection.
8. Java is portable and scalable?
9. There's so much Java open source code available it's not funny.
      http://jakarta.apache.org/   http://enhydra.org/
      http://exolab.org/           http://jacorb.org/
10. Source code is familiar (to C/C++ programmers, anyway) and
    easy to read.
11. Many Java tools are free - like the JDK. The compilers are
    ok but you can't seem to get a free native compiler just yet.
    gcj is on the way. JVMs are freely available for most platforms.

You've not mentioned performance as a criteria - otherwise my
recommendation would have been made more difficult :-)

Perhaps you are not elucidating some requirements that led you to
think of ADA? Perhaps that language is used widely in your industry?

Java can be used effectively with Jython for the things you decide
it's best you don't have strong typing. Understand that the
edit/compile/run turnaround can sometimes slow down development when
using Java (compared to using Python/Jython). Using an IDE such as
JBuilder or Forte should help with this problem.