The best value a language can provide is the community around it. That is, the amount of high quality libraries out there. And the choices, when coming from t

The best value a language can provide is the community around it. That is, the amount of high quality libraries out there. And the choices, when coming from this stance, are a handful: .Net and JVM ecosystems, Python, C/C++, then Perl and Ruby to some extent. With these, you know most of the generic things you'll need to have in order to do the specific thing you want to do are available to you. Equally important the amount of documentation and literature out there. The actual language features, syntax, etc., all come after this. First of all, a language has to have some giants with nice stable shoulders.