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Java was viewed as being "good enough"; alternatives like Scala and Clojure were not considered.

If a company enter the what-is-the-hottest-language-of-the-week game it can easily drag itself in a downward spiral of death. Just because it boils down to taste! And it leaves a lot of hurted feelings around the way. Language is a lot about maintenance 10 years down the road.

Scala and Clojure each have significant design flaws, in my opinion, and neither would have been a significantly better choice.

Couldn't agree more! Be it a startup or a mega-corp, VPs should make their minds upfront and stay on their path until something amazingly better comes down the road. C'mon, if Google had chosen Scala, for example, they could have produced clean, concise code, FP-oriented software at the price of sluggish compilation times (many wasted minutes), lots and lots and lots of generated bytecodes, and binary incompatibility (ouch!). Jump into the trendy language badwagon and you find yourself nowhere pretty soon. I know of at least two prominent startups in Bay Area who are switching of Scala and adopting the old-fashioned Java, for many reasons, but fondness of OO or lack of vision are not among them. And a third startup is stealthily switching to Clojure. On the other hand, you have C/C++.




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