> Anyone who has done a programming contest, advent of code, etc knows that the language doesn’t matter so much as your algorithm.
This is one of the biggest falsehoods in the software engineering I know.
Language is a collaboration glue and influences way of thinking guiding solution development. As an analogy: you can make a statue from a glass or from ice, but while both can be of the same shape and be equally awed upon, the process and qualities will differ.
For the prototypes and throwaways context doesn’t matter - That’s why all short lived contests, golfs and puzzles ignore it. Yet, when software is to be developed not over the week but over the decades and (hopefully) delivered to thousands if not millions of computers it’s the technological context (language, architecture, etc.) that matters the most.