Some blog linked from here (maybe jvns.ca?) made the case that depth of your project's software dependency tree is an important metric. The more crap you have to pull in, the more things can go wrong. You're better off with a large program with no dependencies, than a somewhat smaller program with a ton of dependencies.

Language features on the other hand can let you develop complex programs quickly and reliably, by catching errors before the code gets deployed and so on.