I think that this lingering perception is an artifact of two things. Firstly, in the mid-to-late 90s, Java was really was slow and back then C/C++ application l

I think that this lingering perception is an artifact of two things. Firstly, in the mid-to-late 90s, Java was really was slow and back then C/C++ application layers were pretty common (perl if you could get away with it). So initially Java did not compare well, which is why we wasted a couple years on applets. Even as late as 2005 at Amazon, there were many people predicting doom when we introduced the first Java service as a dependency of the home page. Secondly, the early Java web frameworks were highly synchronous, with lots of locking, and there was no evented IO. So sites written that way really were dogs. Although I hope to never write "public static void main" again (except ironically, of course), and I spend some time dabbling in Python/Ruby/obscure-language land, I'm really happy to see Clojure and Scala doing well here.