What would the boss do? Maybe he'd come to the conclusion that Java and C# are for professionals while Python and Ruby are for hobbyists?
It is.
Dynamic languages are fast and fun, but writing maintainable code in Ruby or Python takes an absurd amount of time and discipline. Take the following real-world, not-at-all-uncommon example. Imagine you have the function "get_results", and you want to quickly determine what all the parameters do. So you have a look at the code:
def get_results(**args):
color = args.pop('color','red')
return generator(color=color).encode(_fetch(**args))
Totally, completely, useless. So you end up following a series of rabbit holes trying to track down the actual usage of these parameters -- and even when you think you've got it all figured out, you still can't be certain because the complex interaction of possibilities in a dynamic language means that you never know what details will end up later being significant.
In order for the thing to be maintainable, the comments would have to outweigh the code by a factor of about 3 to 1, and the documentation needs to be rigorously maintained so that it stays in sync with the code. If you're the original author, then no problem! You wrote the function, so you know what it does. But in a corporate setting with a team of 5 programmers and average turnover, this is a nightmare.
Languages like Java and C# are significantly more verbose and explicit than languages like Python. You're forced to spell everything out in excruciating detail or the thing just won't run. It's like being FORCED to write documentation as part of your program: functions and parameters need to be explicitly declared, class structures can't change shape during execution -- all the important decisions about the shape and usage of your code needs to be decided and written down, and can't be changed without updating all your definitions.
Python and Ruby are "fun" because they don't make you work. There's a cost to skipping all that work, though.
