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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
about I/O disciplines and I should retire to the Tassili-in-Aijer
mountains in Sahara as a camel herder :-)
-- Jarkko Hietaniemi
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Break it into two parts (Score:1)
First is the language itself, some have strengths in different areas. Perl for strings and Java for threads for example.
But then you have the second layer of the language environment, covering libraries, tools, editors, toolchains, compatibility etc etc. Some nice languages have terrible environments (Perl if you ignore CPAN), and some terrible language have amazing environments (Java).
And it's both of these factors in any given area that need to be judged.
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Re:Break it into two parts (Score:2)
I'd add a third to this as well: what's your team's expertise? Sure, anyone can learn Java pretty quickly. (It's a simple language.) But it takes time to get to know the environment, the libraries, the differences from what you already know, and then the idioms and patterns that make you a very efficient programmer. We always talk about languages as if you can change from one to the other without cost, but you can't. (And, as much as some managers don't want to hear it, you can't interchange the people who