Risk. Just rolling the dice and let the highest one win would be an equally well designed game.

tl;dr Language evolution and future outlook are big factors besides the existing language features themselves.

I guess Rust has attracted many C++ devs because C++ is painful and there were no other/better options. Rust comes with a build/dependency management system and memory safety guarantees on top of the type safety. Even though C++ templates are still unmatched, I prefer Rust 95% of the time. C++ is evolving very slow and it’s extremely hard to participate. Rust will win that race eventually.

Python has been around since 1991(!) and it took a looong time to build the community. It was a niche like Nim is now for many years.

I’ll definitely keep an eye on Nim because it has the potential to become quite popular.

Again, that’s all just my opinion.

I have to disagree with your “when use what” list. Python has production ready web backend frameworks, Rust is perfectly fine for complex and high-level software, and PHP is mostly obsolete. That’s my humble opinion though. I looked into Nim and like many of the concepts. It’s quite complex and I prefer Rust most of the time when Nim would be an option. I’d argue it’s some kind of “jack of all trades”. A bit like python but compiled, ref-counted, and probably a lot faster. It’s lacking the huge community python has though.

Also “Witches” which is somewhat similar. Both are great games!