So, like I said in the post (but perhaps didn't make clear enough) is that there are plenty of options for when scaling isn't too much of an issue. But you take a look at Twitter (Ruby/rails and now scala, I think? which kinda goes towards my point) and facebook (hacked up php and made it compile). My thoughts were focused on a language that you could start something small in (aka easy enough to use), but that could scale up reasonably well.