How can you choose a programming language that scales with future growth?

Also take in consideration current languages used in a company. Choosing a completely different language will require extensive training for current employees or hiring of new employees. Which will not only cost more but also will require a lot of time which is more valuable asset.

Taking into account the proficiency of your development team when selecting a programming language. Opting for a language that aligns with the team's existing skill set can minimize the learning curve and expedite the development process.

In my opinion one important factor that I can not see it here is how your language is dealing with modern cloud systems, one of the most aspect of each language is the memory management, how your language is going to feet in cloud systems ? how your language is going to manage the memory aspects ? how much trouble do you have when you want to do async features and stuff ? for example if you use rust you dont need to be worry about race conditions, or if you use golang you have stack growing feature and green threads and ... if you know upfront , your app is going to sit on cloud systems, for sure you need to consider a light weight and modular solutions which can scale up easily and of course do not waste your time on learning curves

I strongly disagree. Firstly use language you are more proficient in. If you have great Java skills write in Java at first. You can always scale after. There are really few cases when you really need specific language, and trust me you will know when you need one. And about frequent changes, it doesn't depend on language it depends on architecture and skills.

The chosen example of concurrency is interesting to me as a PHP developer. PHP doesn't have async capabilities, but that hasn't stopped people from building it - you can check out ReactPHP and Swoole. Both add an event loop and async utilities similar to javascript. So if a language has a missing native feature, someone has probably built it. It might be worth checking before you discount a language.

Being able to use the latest (or still in use) languages/frameworks is what lands you a stable career. There's a reason as to why it's popular in the first place. No point learning a language solely just for its language like esoteric languages that have no real world personal benefit or productivity output.

Some languages have a very steep learning curve and it makes it worse that there aren't enough guides online for free such as on YouTube. This makes it exponentially harder as you would be essentially figuring out many things on your own. If it's not of urgency, try choosing a language that has a large community where you can learn from positively!

There aren't many incompatibilities to consider for most languages. At most, the biggest barrier I've faced is the lack of official images for some languages on linux, such as PHP, and that was years ago. Even then, Docker has somewhat made that a moot point (at least on linux and windows). The industry shift towards microservices means you largely don't have to worry about manually installing language binaries. Even editors aren't all that purpose-built anymore as they've shifted to using plug-in architectures that can add support for different languages as needed. The stuff jetbrains puts out is still leagues nicer than VS Code, but I think you can largely use whatever IDE you want on your machine.

After all that's being said, it all comes down to personal preference. Many web developers out there still strongly prefer PHP as the base and then only use something like React as add-ons. However we must realise that our personal preference will one day shoot ourselves in the foot, we must learn and know when to adopt something that's better than our own personal belief when the time comes in order to ensure that a project/product is up to date and is easily maintable (future proof).

History. Where has a language left its mark? For example, not many people are looking for lua developers. Yet it's the modding language of choice for many games, including World of Warcraft. Warframe, a pretty big live-service game, uses an in-house C++ engine with lua embedded into it. If you're looking to get into game development, it's not a bad language to know. Additionally, people will tell you COBOL and FORTRAN are dead. Yet many financial institutions are still running them to handle trillions of dollars in transactions *a day*. LAPACK, the gold standard for linear algebra, is written in FORTRAN. This wouldn't really be a relevant fact by itself, but both MATLAB and Numpy rely on LAPACK. If you like math, they're not bad to know.

Language doesn’t matter in terms of growth if your architectural decisions are solid from the beginning. This said, object oriented languages like Java are often chosen for their “scalability”, or rather ‘the ability to grow alongside poor design’; this is only a correct choice if your growth directly correlates to increased revenue. Often these languages have an increasing hardware demand that will be proportional to this growth, thus making these options less than preferable for projects whose intent is not to generate profit. All languages can be scalable if your decisions in software design and architecture are consistent and scalable in themselves.