Probably for the same reasons people use Java and Go instead of C. It's just more convenient sometimes. But sometimes not. In terms of building a team at a com

Probably for the same reasons people use Java and Go instead of C. It's just more convenient sometimes. But sometimes not. In terms of building a team at a company? In my experience it's been arbitrary. Manager / Lead has experience in language X, decides to hire people who also know it. Or all the other teams are already using language X. Or Manager / Lead has heard "X language is good at Y" and decides to go with that. Or there's simply 10x more engineers (and cheaper) available for language X than Y. The times I've seen a language picked for a particular purpose: - Perl/Python used for web apps. It's interpreted so you can just upload your source code and refresh your browser. Faster and simpler than having to compile/package it, lots of useful frameworks and modules, lots of developers. - Erlang/OTP for telecom. Kind of on the nose, but there you are. - C and C++ for embedded applications.