From a Saturday-evening blog post which was primarily about job applicants at his company failing a really trivial programming quiz by doing it in Java:

You will not produce anything really brilliant, but you will probably not produce anything too terrible either. The project might fail, but if it does you can probably put the blame somewhere else. After all, you produced 576 classes that contain 10,000 lines of Java code, all of it seemingly essential, so you were doing your job. And nobody can glare at you and demand to know why you used 576 classes when you should have used 50, because in Java doing it with only 50 classes is probably impossible.

(Different languages have different failure modes. With Perl, the project might fail because you designed and implemented a pile of shit, but there is a clever workaround for any problem, so you might be able to keep it going long enough to hand it off to someone else, and then when it fails it will be their fault, not yours. With Haskell someone probably should have been fired in the first month for choosing to do it in Haskell.)