There&#x27;s a gravitational pull towards popular languages because popular languages have more books, more (idiomatic) libraries and tools, copy-pasteble examples all over the web and a big pool of developers that can be productive from day 1 on simple problems.<p>In order to adopt a language that isn&#x27;t in the top 6 or so, you&#x27;ve got to have good reasons for it. And depending on the problems you&#x27;re trying to solve, sometimes it&#x27;s worth it, sometimes it isn&#x27;t. For a startup, with a small but capable team that&#x27;s trying to outrun its competition to market, then using the most productive tools possible is a good choice. In other contexts though, like in a big company where long-term maintainability might be more important than speed to market, well, Java might be the better choice, and not because of the language per se (I think Java code is often unreadable), but more because the cost of maintainability is low due to its popularity and its slow pace of change.