Is there any excuse not to know Java?
karthikm: There is no reason for not knowing something. That being said, knowing Java at this point might be advantageous in many respects because of the mature state of third party libraries available to support all aspects (development, testing, deployment) of any kind of work you are into.If you are a good programmer without a job, it will definitely help you as there are plenty of Java jobs available in the market now.I have personally come across a couple of startups, started by smart engineers from MIT/Stanford, which suffered because they found excuses not to do their work in Java and do it in Ruby/PHP. One of them ended up rewriting everything in Java (which made their initial 6 months of development a throwaway) and sadly, another one got stalled. Am not implying that its better than other languages as each language has its own pros and cons. However, you will not know if it can serve your specific purpose better because you don't know what you don't know.