So - just one comment on this: "The other reason is that when I asked people what they were working on, they all said they were rewriting all the Perl code in

So - just one comment on this: "The other reason is that when I asked people what they were working on, they all said they were rewriting all the Perl code in Java "because Amazon is a Java company" - apparently that was the biggest business need at the time" Having sat in on these kinds of discussions before at companies large and small, while it is certainly sometimes true that companies make a ridiculous platform decision like, "We're a java company", more often than not the decision is a lot more complicated. They might have felt that it was easier to hire people who knew Java, or they leveraged off the shelf software that was written in java, or they acquired a company with interesting tech based on java, or a million other reasons. That doesn't mean they made the right decision, but I'm just making the point that what may trickle down as "we're a java company" didn't start out that way, and may not be based in that fundamental stupidity.