[sahrizv]

I'll outline an approach of mine:

Step 1: Offload the initial selection task to the hype machine. This gives me a smaller set of candidates to work with.

Step 2: Go through the language guides/documentation to understand the core ideas and USP of the languages in the above set.

Step 3: Try to guage the long term viability. This is usually based on some data points but mostly intuition and experience.

Step 4: How does it feel to work with. Is it suitable for the kind of problems you want to solve? Does it provide some technological leverage for the business problem you want to solve, if you are looking for such leverage.

Step 5: Start tinkering with the language(s) that made it past step 4, and be open to update your evaluation during some probation period.

If you want to know my reasoning behind those steps, feel free to ask. :)