Programming language, one man’s cornucopia is another one’s air horn

Whenever I read a rant about a programming language, I try to see if the author actually knew the background of that programming language. In the vast majority of cases, people don’t know the origin of the language they are programming in. One can argue that this may not be necessary, but to me, it often would save time and frustration. To illustrate the topic, I made a little diagram.

programming language design in context
programming language design in context

The situation is this, unless your needs fit more closely to the range of light red and green in the diagram, you are bound to be disappointed with the language that you are dealing with. If you find that many of your concerns are in the brown colour, you really ought to carefully look at what you can trade-off before going further. If the important concerns of your challenge fit more in the blue shapes, you might be better off considering an alternative language altogether.

This is just a quick summary of some simple but often overlooked aspects of programming language selection.