Mark Watson's opinions on Java, Ruby, Lisp, AI, and the Semantic Web: I just tried the Java version of Google App Engine

Mark Watson's opinions on Java, Ruby, Lisp, AI, and the Semantic Web: I just tried the Java version of Google App Engine: "Using EC2 seems closer to the metal in the sense that you need to design an architecture that deals with failing server resources. My first impression is that App Engine abstracts away handling failures at the application level - a benefit, but with a loss of flexibility."