Sure you can, especially with eg Groovy and Grails, but I wouldn't say it's Java's "sweet spot". Plus you tend to attract a lot of corporate enterprise Java dev

Sure you can, especially with eg Groovy and Grails, but I wouldn't say it's Java's "sweet spot". Plus you tend to attract a lot of corporate enterprise Java devs who on average have a different mindset to quick-moving product devs. I moved into a Perl shop straight after and the difference in productivity using off-the-shelf language features was staggering. Ironically I'm very interested in Clojure right now, I get the feeling it could deliver impressive productivity while leveraging underlying Java technologies.