Languages must be pleasant to read and write. Not only for amusement purposes, but also because it makes the code easier to maintain.
Well, feel good by reading a piece of code helps individual to keep doing the job. Choosing a pleasant language to build a solution helps the job to keep finding individuals to maintain it.
This is the hidden cost of old legacy systems. Not all of them are pleasant to maintain because they're ugly. And because of that, they become harder to maintain, since find people to work on it become scarce.