What is also important is the ecosystem that comes along with the language. Modern languages have a wide ranging list of libraries and plugins for them which m

What is also important is the ecosystem that comes along with the language. Modern languages have a wide ranging list of libraries and plugins for them which make certain programming tasks easier. But that also means you have an ever shifting stack that is required to support them. This became apparent to me when trying to get some infrastructure software to play nice with some of the older systems we need to keep around. There were some nice Python based solutions that I had to reject because the dependencies didn't exist for some older RHEL installations we have (yes, we still need to keep a hand full of RHEL 4.x systems around because management doesn't want to tell customers "no we won't support you unless you upgrade to our latest product that works on newer OS releases". So for backup and management solutions, I have to stick with tools that can be easily compiled on the older environments. Another example, one of our architects at work is a strong supporter of Apple, and wanted me to look into Swift. Well at the time you could get Swift for Ubuntu, but couldn't for any version of RHEL (that has finally changed now though). So again, writing my code in plain C was more of a win.