For web apps, maybe. I often find it surprising to learn how unfamiliar web programmers are with the vast amount of non-web programming out there. And even in the web world, almost all heavy-duty middleware is JVM (or, sometimes, C++) based (see twitter, tumblr, Google, Facebook etc.)
It's a bit of a stretch to describe Google, Facebook and Twitter's engineers as "blue collar". Sophisticated middleware is hardly a blue collar domain, definitely more "white collar".
Yeah, you got a point there :) Nevertheless, there's lots of blue-collar programming done in Java in the enterprise world. Much, much more than Ruby/python/PHP.
