Code Complete is a programming book by Steve McConnell which includes a second about how to choose a language for your project. It very briefly examines a wide variety of languages: Ada, Assembly, C, C++, C#, Cobol, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, SQL, and Visual Basic.
It also includes a table that it calls a "language-selection quick reference" that lists the best and worst languages for various tasks. Most of the entries in this table seem straight-forward. For example, Java is listed among the best at cross-platform development, distributed systems, dynamic memory use, and ease of maintenance. Java is also listed among the best at security, though there seems to be some debate about that lately. Naturally, Java is listed among the worst in direct memory manipulation, environments with limited memory, and real-time applications.
In the "report writing" row the best languages are Cobol, Perl, and Visual Basic, and the worst languages are Assembly and Java. I don't know much about report writing, but I'm not surprised to see those three languages listed as best, and I am very surprised to see Java listed along with assembly language. Since I read that I've been trying to figure out exactly what part of report writing is unusually difficult in Java. Is C language really preferable over Java for report writing?
