We need more devs who are not so emotionally invested in their tools. Not that they shouldn't care about them, but the loud-mouthed, posturing alpha dev stereotype gets too much airtime on the Internet because they instigate drama and drive hits by playing on the audience. It is little more than bikeshedding, ultimately.
Tools matter, at every scale.
I can bootstrap a project in Ruby or Python considerably faster than I can in Java. But when it comes time to scale, Java usually -- not always, but most of the time -- wins out. They all can do it. None is really more expressive than any other. It's just the level of effort involved. And the pros and cons of each usually start to even out as a project grows.
For problems with low domain complexity but involve a lot of boiler plate code, a more expressive language wins out. Likewise, if you spend the majority of your time thinking about the problem and little time on the actual implementation, then the language may not be your bottleneck.
They often make remarks about how Rails is easy and Java programming is where real men make their mark.
I think this comes down to a need for people to feel proud about the tools they use and the things they make.
I've had an Enterprise Java guy telling me once that "programming and Object Orientation got lost with those simpler, easy-to-use language and frameworks", referring to Ruby and Rails.
I dunno about that. Alan Kay would probably say that it got lost with C++ and Java, but YMMV.
Also, one word: speed.
But... I don't really think it boils down to this, it's not like one is better than the other. Proof is that both communities are learning from each other, and there's also JRuby... it's a great thing.
You did tell him Ruby is roughly as old as Java, Python is older and Smalltalk predates Java by almost 15 years right?
After some good natured ribbing that he 'doesn't hate Java developers, he just feels bad for them' He finally told me quite directly that he was apprehensive to move forward with me because hes worked with Java devs who made the jump to Python and they wrote Python code that looked like Java and he wasn't certain I'd be any different.
It was quite bizarre as he had access to a lot of my Python code.