> In the case of startups, their goal is to sell out way before the maintenance phase of the lifecycle.
Or grow so quickly that replacing most the legacy code from a year or two ago is not a significant hurdle at their new size.
In this vein, I wonder if there's actually a third path that might be better than both. Using a low-level but fairly expressive and strongly typed language but very loosely, such that it allows you to iterate fact but with less performance, and you can come back later and replace chunks as needed, but with the same language. I don't have any real experience with that, and I could see it going either way for a number of reasons, but it seems like we have more languages that might fit that criteria now (or at least they are more popular now) than we have previously.
In the case of startups, their goal is to sell out way before the maintenance phase of the lifecycle. So, it doesn't really matter to them so much as quickly getting out working features. In other cases, esp long-lasting endeavors, then this is a good point to consider.