[faizshah]

People overrate the elegance and readability of languages. You can write elegant and inelegant Java. I've seen python code that is totally unmaintainable and python code that's some of the most elegant out there. You can find Rails code that is some of the most indecipherable spaghetti out there despite Ruby being such an elegant language (the project had Fat Controllers, Fat Views and Fat Stored Procedures...yikes). There's a lot of elegant C code out there then there's C code where you don't wanna touch anything because you're not sure what anything does.

I think the general rule of thumb for languages is pick whichever language has the best community, learning resources and packages for your project.

For example R excels at analyzing data because of the wealth of packages from industry and academia for analyzing data and the tutorials dedicated to statistical analysis in R. Python excels at high performance data driven products because of the wealth of packages for ML, scientific computing, etc and the wealth of resources on doing these things in python.

The exception to this is JS and your point about Phoenix LiveView. Potentially it could be better to pick a single language for frontend and backend to limit context switching while developing frontend and backend.

I haven't used Clojure or Haskell yet so I don't know what they excel at. I also haven't dived into Erlang and Go enough to know which situations either is better for scalable backends.

[jiveturkey]

> People overrate the elegance and readability of languages. You can write elegant and inelegant Java.

It's not what you can write, it's what the next guy can write.

You can write elegant Perl. But the language isn't suited to that. The next guy is going to use a more typical write-only style of Perl. Extreme example, but you take my point.

[keithwhor]

> People overrate the elegance and readability of languages.

> The exception to this is JS

JavaScript is beautiful. You're crazy.

[faizshah]

I think I was unclear. I meant that the exception to picking a language based on community, resources and modules are JS and Phoenix Liveview where there is an additional benefit of using a single language for frontend and backend. In these two examples you might forego using a separate language for frontend and backend (that could have a better community, resources or modules for what you are building) because you can use the same language for both (which offers the unique advantage of having to use and learn less tools for a fullstack app).