I think that that's a fascinating look at it, and yet, I think that the success of small startups, and the ever-shrinking tech company has been a vilification, of sorts. You look at Facebook, and it has been a much smaller company than Google (the most successful company on the map right now, that uses Java widely). Twitter (where that Clojure guy Nathan Marz went) is even smaller than Facebook. Is it possible that language/management choices have had an effect on this? I certainly think so.
I think the verdict should still be out on Java, because I think that the success of Java is dependent on two confluent economic factors.
(1) there's a lot of people who want nice stable jobs, but aren't really pg's type of hackers per se, and
(2) "management" oriented people tend to have big pockets in our present economic environment
But if we remember from economics, competitive markets tend to drive the cost down to the minimum cost of production. You can deploy vast amounts of capital to build a large organization that hires Java programmers, but is it possible to seed lots of small teams hacking in more productive languages, and is it possible for them to create more software that more people are interested in using? Heck, is it possible to use that model to just develop features that bigger organizations might buy out, instead of developing them in-house with the aforementioned armies? I dunno, but it seems like something worth exploring. ;-)
I think the verdict should still be out on Java, because I think that the success of Java is dependent on two confluent economic factors.
(1) there's a lot of people who want nice stable jobs, but aren't really pg's type of hackers per se, and
(2) "management" oriented people tend to have big pockets in our present economic environment
But if we remember from economics, competitive markets tend to drive the cost down to the minimum cost of production. You can deploy vast amounts of capital to build a large organization that hires Java programmers, but is it possible to seed lots of small teams hacking in more productive languages, and is it possible for them to create more software that more people are interested in using? Heck, is it possible to use that model to just develop features that bigger organizations might buy out, instead of developing them in-house with the aforementioned armies? I dunno, but it seems like something worth exploring. ;-)