It's not quite as simple as preferring one color over another - some languages, by (their own) definition, lend themselves to certain tasks more willingly than

It's not quite as simple as preferring one color over another - some languages, by (their own) definition, lend themselves to certain tasks more willingly than others. Rather than expecting a specific gain from a language (e.g. 20% faster development), you have to think in terms of avoiding the language that might be 20% slower for the specific problem being solved. For example, a seasoned engineer would likely not choose to use PHP for a stateful, socket-based messaging system to connect a dozen or so users. Why? Because PHP is not designed to do that task well. It could do it - you could poll an HTTP end-point and use a cache for really fast persistence to wire it all up - but you'd likely start having to write code around the problems you'd encounter for all of the nuances to your specific implementation. Yet another example: The main reason Go looks attractive to a certain set of developers is that it solves a problem with describing and handling concurrency that they've had with a lot of other languages. They would be dumb to say that Go is carte-blanche better than PHP (or Ruby, or Java, or even C/C++), but that doesn't mean they won't see a potentially significant improvement in using it.