can is probably an overreach, but I expect the author was referring to the wide range of projects like Hadoop, Solr, etc.

If you want static typing, decent performance (and especially if you want a wide range of people who can work on your software) then you have C++/C# or Java. Or you are feeling adventurous or are ex-Google then maybe Golang.

There are other languages of course, but for most you are going to be struggling to find programmers who know them and library support isn't there, so you are writing lost of stuff yourself. If that's what you like, then fine.

If you don't want static typing, then there's a much broader range of course.

Or some kind of godawful tiered corporate thing that's big and unwieldy precisely because it's implemented in java?

Believe me, godawful corporate things are unwieldy in whatever language they are written in.

Have you ever seen a corporate Rails app? The saying "it compiles so it must work" is supposed to be a joke, but I've seen Rails apps where a large amount of the app would never have compiled if Ruby had a compile step. But then they did claim that Rails was an improvement because they could develop faster with out the compile cycle. Most of the app didn't work, but yes.. I concede that not having to make sure it worked did let them get in on servers faster.

Scary but true.