That's only partially true. Compile times are absolutely a factor in development time for the same reason that how long your test suite takes to run is a factor. A faster feedback loop can shorten dev cycles. If nothing else, it's more fun to have faster compiles.

This is one reason Go is so appealing to many people. The compile times make it "feel" like ruby or python or php in terms of "hit refresh and the change is there" style of development. That is a huge difference from, hit save and wait a minute for my java project to compile, and push out to tomcat a minute later. Even with JRebel the best I've seen is a 2-5 second page change refresh cycle in Scala and a minimum 5 second test suite reload time using SBT.

Scala is a beautiful language, but compared to Go, it's a very slow dev cycle.

> compile times shouldn't be a major factor in choosing a language

Not sure about that, I'm using C# to write office plugins and it takes forever to start up each time. Often I forget what I'm supposed to be looking at by the time it's started.