What's the best programming language? It depends

“What's the best programming language?”

As direct as it gets, from a friend who's an engineering leader at a FAANG company, expecting a decisive answer.

Me: It depends 😀

Follow-up: How so?

Me:

• If I'm picking for myself, it's the language I'm most comfortable with (within the same realm, of course; it's not impossible, but still not a great idea to swap HTML for Java).
• If I'm picking for my team, it's the one most of the team is comfortable with and has expertise in.

Follow-up: What if you're the CTO?

Me: Thanks for the offer, but that doesn't apply to me. Even then, the answer would depend on the size of the technology team.

Follow-up: Imagine it's a company of 1,000-plus people.

Where it gets interesting

This is where it gets interesting, and where bias can creep in. For the application that powers the business, it has to be a strongly typed, compiled language with experts who are easy to find and hire, and a rich, mature library ecosystem.

In the real world, though, most startups try to grow quickly by focusing on the business and iterating rapidly. That's where interpreted languages shine in the beginning.

So all the answers are more or less good.