I don't know if anyone ever got sacked for recommending Java, but I did interview with a shop (who shall remain nameless) at one point that was generating an image-based search engine. They seemed to have a highly competent technical team.

After they had done a bunch of prototyping in Perl, they decided that they had to do the real thing in Java.

After a coule of months, they discovered that development time was significantly slower (and couldn't keep up with their changing business demands) and the execution time of the Java code was unacceptable relative to Perl.

They immediately switched back to Perl and discovered that, although the business folks had lost a bit of buzzword-compliance, Perl had been by far the most practical choice from the get-go.

Go figure.