Comment by cestith
5 hours ago
People don’t generally care about the best language. They care about a passable language with the best library access and great support (either commercially or via the community, but preferably both).
I’m not even fond of Python, but I use it sometimes because things exist for it to use and because there are lots of developers around who can share the work on the code. If I write something in R, APL, Julia, OCaml, Forth, Scheme, or Lisp at work I’m going to be the only maintainer and will probably get a stern lecture about that. If I use Perl, Ruby, Java, or PHP, there are a few more people but it’d better be code only my team has to maintain. Go, Rust, C, C++, TypeScript, maybe JavaScript, and Python are safe in most of the company’s codebases but only C, C++, or Rust for the code that needs the most performance and the most stability of resource use.
> People don’t generally care about the best language. They care about a passable language with the best library access and great support (either commercially or via the community, but preferably both).
Moreover, to the extent that they care about the “best” (or at least “better” within the scope of options with suitable ecosystems) language, “best”/“better” is highly subjective and shaped very much by familiarity