| This is not actually an "either-or" question. For a minimum viable product, you need to do the minimal amount of work, whatever that turns out to be for the startup you are building. Is it something like DropBox? In that case, you need to write at least part of your product as a Win32 Shell Extension, and regardless of how well you know Java, it is MORE work doing that in Java than in C++ Is it the new GoogleDocs/ZohoOffice? In that case, about 90% of your work is in JavaScript or a language that compiles cleanly to JavaScript. This might be Java (by way of GWT), but probably isn't. Is it a new "enterprise software system"? Java is probably a good choice, even if Java wasn't your strongest point. And if it HAS to be java for some reason, there's Clojure, Jython, Mira, LinJ and a few others that let you switch slowly and incrementally, without having to decide or make a tradeoff. |