Really liked this excerpt from an article worth reading from start to finish (from How to Build a High Velocity Development Team):
“JavaScript is the standard language of the web platform, and your app should be written in JavaScript on both the client and the server side. Why? JavaScript is the most popular programming language on the planet*, and the easiest to hire for.
There are more working open-source solutions in JavaScript than there are in any other language. Your team will have to write less code from scratch.
JavaScript is the only language that can run universal code natively across the entire web platform stack, including clients, servers, and mobile.
What is “Universal JavaScript?”
Universal means that you write the code once and it works on all your platforms. Instead of building an iOS app, an Android app, a web app, and a server app, you build one app that powers them all.
There’s no such thing as “Universal Java” (they tried, but failed), “Universal Swift”, “Universal Ruby”, or “Universal PHP”.
Only JavaScript offers native access to the web platform APIs that work on desktop and mobile systems, and only JavaScript offers native access to the npm repository, where 50% of the packaged solutions work on both servers and clients*.”