[allengeorge]

Valid points.

I'd like to address the "completely new environment" issue though. That should only be considered if you're thinking of owning and modifying the component. There are many software packages that you're going to use as-is, and interact with only via an API or CLI. In those cases the depth of the API/CLI, the quality of its documentation and the strength of its community matter way more than implementation language. (For example - who cares if nginx is written in C although your entire stack is Python or Java?)

If you're thinking of continually making changes in a package however - that's a different matter.