If the language goes on to achieve a critical mass of developers, most of the early adopters will go on to write libraries duplicating functionality they had in other platforms. As time goes on, and the code base grows, eventually some kind of dependency management, build system, and network repository is required.

Finally, after the peak, when the language gets mainstreamed, the initial die hards complain of bloat, of how the language is no longer as cool as it used to be when hardly anyone appreciated it, and some new upcoming language is deemed the Next Best Thing.

:)

There’s a somewhat biased/stereotyped notion in declaring that someone chooses Java over say, Rails, because it’s “safe”. Many people choose it because of the feature rich tool chain that makes Java development far from painful, and somewhat of a joy sometimes. I use GWT for many reasons, but one of the biggest is simply that using Javascript for big projects with multiple third party libraries is frustrating rather than a joy.

My server-side stuff these days is done with Scala + Lift. The terse-ness of Ruby+Rails, but type checking, Java tools and library integration, IDE code assist and limited type inferencing, plus high performance. I’ve got beefs with Scala too, but hey, it even gives you a REPL/interpreter.