> I've seen it. There are definitely incorrect language choices for certain projects.

I guess we can all agree that writing your web application using a fortran framework to generate JS code is a bad idea.

But if you pick tfa's second example, picking Go vs. Rust for a new project, the language choice is secondary. Both languages were likely fine unless the project as a specific library requirement.

The main criteria to make the choice was likely whether the team had developers with some experience in that language, and whether using that language would make them feel dead inside in the morning when they check in ; and I'm pretty sure developers can be found that make either choice a great choice.

The point tfa's making, that picking a language defines culture, the hiring pipeline etc. is fitting neither the first example (team already there, and a rewrite is almost always a bad choice) nor the second example (team also already there, and the culture with them. Pipeline therefore irrelevant).

In my first post, the example I really wanted to use was people picking Go for their top-end, competitive-with-anything-in-the-market database. I choose Python just because anyone who would argue that is a good choice is clearly not someone who is in a position to see reason. But I think Go is a serious mistake... it's just one that lets you get to market, unlike Python which never would. But it's still going to end up holding back the company that makes that decision in the end.