Well, sorry if I insulted anyone, but I'd think worrying about the "hacker acceptance factor" of a piece of tech is awfully non-hackerish. You can write corpor

Well, sorry if I insulted anyone, but I'd think worrying about the "hacker acceptance factor" of a piece of tech is awfully non-hackerish. You can write corporate drone type stuff in any language -- and you can write awesome code in any language. Java with a lot of immutability, closures (anonymous classes) and ExecutorServices is like a syntactically weird multi-threaded lisp. Very elegant. The language itself has something like 15 keywords, total. As the person said upthread, you can look at some horrible 2002 EJB webapps (and I'm sure you can find their equivalents in rails), or you can look at projects like Hadoop, Hbase, Cassandra, etc. In general, static languages are probably a bad idea for webapps or scripting -- that doesn't mean they're the province of drones.