[AndrewDucker]

Statically typed languages are favoured when you're working on a team with 40 other developers and you want the idiotic changes being made 5 desks over to break before they check in, not after you've pulled their changes.

Autocomplete also makes life staggeringly easier, as do strong refactoring tools.

Not having to deal with memory management is also a big plus.

When you put those requirements together you end up with C#/Java. Which is why a fair number of places whack together UIs in C# and server side code in Java.

[Tichy]

On the other hand, maybe you wouldn't need 40 developers on the project if you weren't building it in Java...

[0xEA]

Once your code base gets to a certain size, the feature set gets big enough, and the maintenance starts stacking up, you need a more robust language.

Sure, plenty of web apps can run fine on Ruby, but even then, many of them start looking towards a language thats easier to maintain.

[mseebach]

Good developers can move fast in Java, bad developers will move slow and screw up, even in Ruby.

[theshadow]

Obviously, every Java project with hundreds of thousands lines of code can be written by 2 developers in Ruby in a weekend ;)

[AndrewDucker]

Possibly. But I'd like to see that proven.