At my day job, Java is the official sanctioned platform, everything else is considered "ad-hoc", a prototype. As one who prefers Django+Python, I kind of wish

At my day job, Java is the official sanctioned platform, everything else is considered "ad-hoc", a prototype. As one who prefers Django+Python, I kind of wish it would die sometimes... I can imagine this is a common industry trend among mid-to-large-size companies. That's why I've been interested in Scala lately. I could see advantages to opening up your platform to enterprise drones. Scala might be a way to do it without becoming an enterprise drone in the process :) Despite the hype and UML-wielding enterprise architects standing around it, Java-the-platform is still interesting. mailinator was done in Java (see http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2007/01/architecture-of-mailinator.html http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2007/01/architecture-of-mailinator.html ), and handles tremendous amounts of spam on cheap hardware. And there's RabbitMQ, the Java-compatible message bus written in Erlang. Java doesn't have to suck...