| This post reflects the conventional wisdom very accurately. It is informative and contains good advice. However, I also think it is a biased caricature based on "common sense" that isn't all that well founded. Most of these languages are entirely usable in areas far outside the prescribed areas you have given for them. If you are working on a few domains like embedded or OS stuff, low-level graphics or signal processing - or you need to interact with a specific system that is pretty language-specific like Rails or iOS - then your options narrow a lot. A few tasks are just a little forced unless your level of comfort is very high (doing 1-minute shell script jobs in C++, for example). But it would be very hard to overstate the degree of overlap, in 2012. It no longer usually makes sense to write things in ASM for speed, for example... In the rare situations where your favorite higher-level language is somehow not good enough for a given project, it is rare that you cannot make a mongrel project which drops to another level just where necessary. If your language does not support this then it is broken in a generally important way. If you are not really ready or willing to fill in gaps and just want to glue existing things together, that changes things slightly - then your primary consideration is not the language but the available libraries. The major differences between languages are mostly matters of custom and ideology rather than niche suitability. |