You will doubtlessly get many opinions on this. It's worth keeping in mind that the "dev time" is a function of existing libraries, internal and external. At a

You will doubtlessly get many opinions on this. It's worth keeping in mind that the "dev time" is a function of existing libraries, internal and external. At any fairly large company (e.g. Google) that has many existing internal libraries in some language (java), the dev time will be massive to switch. By this logic, the dev time is too costly for absolutely any language you pick other than the one being used. There is little exception to this. For a programmer or programmers with no legacy cruft, I'd argue that dev time is more a function of the programmer's familiarity with a language than the language itself. Perhaps there are a few exceptions to that, but in general I don't think that a language should be described as "too" anything. Java might be memory inefficient, but does that mean it's usage "too high"? Clearly not for some people as it's still used frequently.