[TheOtherHobbes]

I think that's wrong for at least some contexts, because - for example - Python is so slow that it can literally become the bottleneck on any non-toy server. So unless you're running a one-person blog or don't carDjango should probably not be your first choice for a scalable production server.

People argue about languages because they all have different trade-offs for performance/efficiency, initial development time, developer cost, developer availability, and maintenance.

The differences are real, and they have real effects on the profitability and the prospects of success/failure of any project.

Management quality and culture do too, obviously. But you can assume that for a given level of management competence, different languages will still create different business outcomes.

[wpietri]

Can you give an example of a company that failed because somebody chose Python? Or even one with materially worse business results, say a 20% reduction in revenue?

My guess is no, because people make fine businesses out of nominally unscalable technologies all the time. Rails is a notorious performance pig, for example, but there are plenty of successful businesses built in it. When server bottlenecks become an issue, modest performance tricks and ops magic are applied, and suddenly per-server performance is no longer the problem. And still, despite being a pig, Rails is a great place to start, because its real power is not CPU efficiency, but ease with which you can get something workable up and then iterate.

There is no language that is so fast that it's infinitely scalable out of the box. Every software company that grows hits performance problems with naive uses of the tools at hand. Every successful one figures out how to make things work. And making technologies serve the human purpose at hand isn't a characteristic of good languages; it's a characteristic of good teams.