Perl with Catalyst, DBIx::Class, and Template Toolkit. All the actual every-day code is really simple because all three are designed for extensibility. I just write little plugins that abstract away the repetitive stuff. I also write lots of long-lived systems daemons. They do all the asynchronous tasks in a super efficient way. Not enough people use this technique in my experience.
I just use cron for asynchronous tasks, because it's less complex to write for (just write the script to do the task once, after all), and any unix will already have cron running for other things.
Yeah cron works for lots of stuff. Some things need to happen asynchronous but more quickly than is convenient to do with cron. Not enough people use cron jobs though either.
