>For those who don't "love" their language (which really just translates to "they have not expressed interest in continuing to develop with it", based on what SO gives us), is it because of another language capturing their imagination more?
As a C++ dev, definitely Rust. It got almost everything right that is horrible with C++, while still maintaining similar power.
Personally, I find Stackoverflow's surveys pretty useless. Python has 73% "loved", which tells me...what? That 73% of Python developers like Python. But what else do they have experience with? Is this just objectively "I like Python", or "I like Python more than X"? What is X? For those who don't "love" their language (which really just translates to "they have not expressed interest in continuing to develop with it", based on what SO gives us), is it because of another language capturing their imagination more? What languages are those, have they actually used it in the past in production, etc.