Sure, in some domains you have to use specific languages because of the constraints of the domain. However, as you yourself state, a language can play a signifi

Sure, in some domains you have to use specific languages because of the constraints of the domain. However, as you yourself state, a language can play a significant impact when it comes to productivity. For example, immutability provides similar benefits to GC. Instead of the developer having to manually manage references across the project by hand, the language takes care of that work. This frees the developer from doing additional work, and removes a source of errors. This also directly leads to the ability to do local reasoning about code resulting in developers needing less context to understand code. So, if GC plays a significant enough role then it's highly likely that immutability does as well because it addresses a similar set of problems.