Java is horrible for prototyping, it's designed for large environments where management of complexity (through interfaces and some level of top down design) is desirable.
It's not a hacker language.
PG makes a very good point though - that today's teenagers (hackers?) are tomorrows CEOs. But not everyone can be above average, not every CEO can be of a technology company, and eventually those CEOs need to hire average programmers to do basic enterprise information systems work.
Scala on the JVM with play framework is looking pretty agile these days too
It's not a hacker language.
PG makes a very good point though - that today's teenagers (hackers?) are tomorrows CEOs. But not everyone can be above average, not every CEO can be of a technology company, and eventually those CEOs need to hire average programmers to do basic enterprise information systems work.
Scala on the JVM with play framework is looking pretty agile these days too