I personally like Java a lot and would use it in a startup. It's solid and easy to get good performance out of. It also has a huge amount of open source librari

I personally like Java a lot and would use it in a startup. It's solid and easy to get good performance out of. It also has a huge amount of open source libraries. But I wouldn't necessarily use it for everything. Python / Ruby has good frameworks for the presentation layer of a web app. The perfect combination would be a dynamic language for the web server that calls a java based web service for most of the functionality (Jersey rocks)