Blaine spots Vince Foley making an excellent analogy:

I compared dynamic languages and Java with riding a bike; in dynamic languages, you ride on two wheels and you get where you want pretty quickly. You can fall if the road is slippery, if you hit a rock or something, but with a little experience, these cases rarely occur. On the other hand, riding a Java bike is like having 8 wheels to make sure you don’t fall over, 10 people constantly around you, ready to catch you should you fall. You may be safer, but you’re not getting places faster than the dynamic biker.

This came in the context of the following:

A friend of mine told me tonight that his boss is putting the axe in Java at his workplace. This is explained by the very low productivity of Java. Demands made by users are never delivered on time, and apparently the programmers are not really to blame, they know their stuff pretty well. Java is simply too complex, puts too many sticks in their wheels for them to be really productive.

The mainstream languages are a safety net for most people - using them means that you probably won't fail any worse than anyone else. The flip side of that is that you won't succeed any better, either. If you want to go faster, you have to look beyond the mainstream.