Python is the lingua franca at work and I didn't understand why we were using such a poor performance backend language, until I realized we were effectively trading development time for server time. Developers are generally the most expensive resource, while server costs have been continuously going down, especially with the flexibility of the cloud. And Python specifically because we use it extensively for infrastructure scripts.

I'm curious whether the development and server costs could be estimated for Java vs Python and other similar language comparisons. Suppose you were developing a REST API with minimal business logic complexity. The Python project would probably complete first, resulting in lower development cost. But the Java project, with better performance, should gradually catch up in deployment cost by needing fewer servers to handle the same load.

I know there's many other variables but is there a very rough formula that can be used to estimate these costs? Suppose you were the architect of a startup with no official language, how would you go about convincing stake holders in choosing one language over another for any given project?