[eneveu]

It's hard enough just getting the thing out the door without having to also deal with the pain of learning new paradigms, new dev tools, constantly having to look stuff up and wondering if you're doing something fundamentally wrong.

Yes, but it's also more fun :) I think fun and passion are important for a startup. But I agree that one needs to strike the right balance, and pragmatism is good when you want to ship.

Force yourself to start writing other things with the language you want to use TODAY. I would start writing utility stuff in something else until you're comfortable with it.

I think that's indeed the best course of action. I've read about people who started using Groovy for unit testing at first. Another good example is my colleague who built a small customized issue tracker in Grails for the Java project they were working on.

"It's also a little funny to see Python and Ruby described as more powerful that Java! I guess powerful is a mutable word, but personally I'd consider them less powerful but faster to develop in (for a dev at the same skill level in both languages)." By "powerful", I didn't mean "performant". Due to the JVM, Java is faster than Python / Ruby. I used the word "powerful" in the same sense as Paul Graham did in his essay on Lisp ( http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ), that is, a higher level, more expressive language. With today's hardware, using a high-level, slower language is not a problem anymore: we now optimize for human time (development time) instead of machine time.