Tim Bray:

You know, those of us out there in the Ruby/Python/Erlang fringes might think we're building the Next Big Thing, and we might be right too, but make no mistake about it: as of today, Java is the Big Leagues, the Show, where you find the most Big Money and Big Iron and Big Projects. You don't have to love it, but you'd be moronic to ignore it.

… and the programmers ask for Big Money, write Big Code, and we can’t afford the Big Money to pay for them, or the Big Time to read the code … let alone maintain it.

(Which is not to say I have any problems with someone else giving/selling me an application in Java which solves one of my problems - provided they maintain it, I’m not that moronic :-)