Exactly. (Obviously the preference would not be to prototype ideas in a statically typed language.) My expectation of the mythical Google engineer is that s/he

Exactly. (Obviously the preference would not be to prototype ideas in a statically typed language.) My expectation of the mythical Google engineer is that s/he can crank out the code whether its Python, Java, or C++. So, I remain unconvinced that Google the company is going to lose wonderful ideas because of their strong preferences regarding their production codebase.