Comment Re:Why be language specific? (Score 1) 897
First, a language is more than just a tool; it's an entire ecosystem. Writing working code in a new language -- learning the syntax -- isn't too tough for most people. But beyond that... well, just remember that every task can be accomplished in many different ways (sometimes using core libraries, sometimes using 3rd party APIs, and with many different approaches to implementation), and you aren't going to have a clue when you're new to a language. Even with languages that are only relatively newly popular (like Ruby) there are often multiple libraries offering similar functionality that you want to include in a new project, and it's quite hard to know which is better until you've used them for a while.
The benefit of someone with experience in a given language is that they'll already *know* about the weird pitfalls and bugs in specific core libraries, bugs in specific versions of this or that, the best library to use for threading, or HTML scraping, or PDF generation, etc. etc.. The syntax is a fairly small part of what you need to be an effective developer in a new language (being a developer also involves estimating effort for tasks, debugging, doing security analysis, optimizing/scaling, etc. -- all things that are doable if you know the language "ecosystem", but not possible just knowing the syntax.
Second, existing code base and existing developer experience mean that even if Python is a better fit for a new task, and you could do it in Python in 10 minutes, you may still have to use Java because most of the other guys are "Java developers" and they're going to need to maintain it.