> And BTW, I have yet to encounter a problem that is hard to solve in my preferred language, but is way easier to solve in another. I think the key to that is to choose carefully what you're going to commit to.
Long-running light-weight servers are nearly impossible to write in PHP, but a breeze in Go. There are tons of problem spaces where the only available libraries are in C/C++ or Java, which means its going to be easier to solve the problem in those languages than it is to build a new library from scratch. Python has some of the best packages for a number of problems, like machine learning, data science, image manipulation. Even if Go is purpose built for web crawling, beautiful soup (Python) is still what I'd choose for getting a scraper up and running quickly. And of course since The Web Is King everybody has to use JS for something these days.
If you're a large shop doing a lot of things, it's going to be more work to stick to one or two languages than it is to pick the best language for the job.
Long-running light-weight servers are nearly impossible to write in PHP, but a breeze in Go. There are tons of problem spaces where the only available libraries are in C/C++ or Java, which means its going to be easier to solve the problem in those languages than it is to build a new library from scratch. Python has some of the best packages for a number of problems, like machine learning, data science, image manipulation. Even if Go is purpose built for web crawling, beautiful soup (Python) is still what I'd choose for getting a scraper up and running quickly. And of course since The Web Is King everybody has to use JS for something these days.
If you're a large shop doing a lot of things, it's going to be more work to stick to one or two languages than it is to pick the best language for the job.