Charlie Savage questions the conventional wisdom:

My take is that contrary to popular wisdom, a good language gets out of your way and lets you do what you need to. This is quite counterintuitive. Computer programs are pinnacles of brittle complexity - one tiny mistake in millions of lines of code brings the whole edifice crashing down. The natural inclination is to make the walls of that edifice as thick and strong as possible. Java is a great example of this line of thought

Later on, he says something I've said many, many times:

In more concrete terms, if code is buggy then you want to be able to write up a patch, throw it in a directory somewhere, and have the application load it automatically replacing the invalid code. Or closely related, you want to provide a simple mechanism to add in new functionality, just like Selenium does via its user user-extensions.js file.

That's what I do with BottomFeeder and this server - I patch in place, at runtime. Some people find that scary, but it works.

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