I think your example of an Enterprise Finance app and TONS of Java programmers is over generalizing things a bit, of who can benefit from things like GWT. I wo

I think your example of an Enterprise Finance app and TONS of Java programmers is over generalizing things a bit, of who can benefit from things like GWT. I would contest, GWT is used by some people who sort of already grokked some of the points made by this article, some years back. For example, coding in JS giving a feel of coding in assembly, particularly without the help of any good editors. Another example to break the Enterprise only narrative: 'Google Flights' is done in GWT. And you and me can guess, there won't be 200 avg developers coding that product. I came from an Enterprise background before our Internet Startup. Few of us coded up our app, in 3 months flat out using mainly Java and GWT. One of the reasons we chose GWT was that, when we started out IE 6 still had a considerable share, and GWT generated JS which ran on it very well (although slowly).