I’ll say that when I started working on finl a couple years ago, I started in C++ (employing 20+-year-old memories of the language). When I switched to Rust, starting from zero, I found myself instantly productive. Yes, there are some things that are harder, but in general, the if it compiles, it works rule holds for Rust. I can still remember some rather disturbing bugs that should never have even compiled in some of my early C code (e.g., treating argv values as if they were variables and could be modified in place).
Although Python is getting long a little in the tooth. It used to be a simple, easy to learn language, but who can honestly claim its async implementation is 'simple and easy to learn'?
I'm curious if there are any newer alternatives that fit in the same niche.
There's a wide gulf between "one-off afternoon-long project done for fun" and "serving all traffic for amazon.com during black friday", so I am receptive to the "I can just do this one off thing in Perl". On the other hand I know that once you get familiar with Rust it can be very productive (the "it hurts when I do that" stops when you learn to preemptively "don't do that" and stop fearing "this code is inefficient because it has two extra allocations!!!1") and I've seen too many "weekend projects" become the backbone of large enterprises. Rust's superpower is being able to scale up and down. But the GP might be talking about a project that falls squarely on the former. Anything that starts to move towards the later, I would immediately push for a language/ecosystem more tuned for "maintainability" than "time to first char on screen".
This will reinforce bad patterns early on which they will have to unlearn through bug hunting or reading about the edge cases and foot guns.