Unlike most design issues that are technical tradeoffs, the language choice issue is often influenced by tradition, politics and power.  As software engineers, our primary considerations are cost, schedule, and quality.  We would like to make an objective determination based on reason and empirical evidence.
 

Language Categories

• Imperative Languages (Cobol, Pascal, Fortran)
• Object-oriented Languages (Smalltalk, Eiffel, Java, Ada95, C++, Component Pascal)
• Functional Languages (Lisp, ML)
• Logic Languages (Prolog)

• Database Queries (SQL)
• Database Applications (Access, Powerbuilder, Delphi, Focus)
• Prototyping (Tcl, Visual Basic)
• Windows applications (Visual Basic, Delphi)
• WWW (html, javascript)
• UNIX scripting (Perl)
• Internet applications (Java, InterDev)

Selection Criteria

• Customer Requirement - The customer may mandate the language to be used. Often this is because they want to be able to maintain the code.
• Programmer skill level - It may be more cost-effective to select a language with which the programming staff is already fluent. However, an experienced programmer should be able to learn a new language easily, and no doubt will have to several times during his or her career.
• Application domain - Choose a language that best suits the characteristics of your application. For example, Cobol suits the business domain because (why?). Fortran suits the scientific domain because (why?). Ada suits the embedded system domain because (why?). Powerbuilder suits the database domain because (why?).
• Design methodology - Choose a language that matches your design methodology.
• Quality attributes in your requirements - portability, maintainability, reliability, reusability. Languages have a major effect on your project's quality requirements. For example, it's quite difficult to write a portable C program. Note: if you chose Java because you think it's the only language that runs on multiple platforms, you need to read this list of languages for the JVM.
• Availability of supporting tools: Compiler (obviously), IDEs, debuggers, linkers, editors, libraries, test coverage tools, GUI builder, etc.
• Other factors - Standards, training, books and support are important to many people, especially in large organizations.

Imperative Language Characteristics

• Data structures with assignable values
• Compile-time binding
• Explicit storage allocation

Functional Language Characteristics

• Computing is done with expressions
• Programmer doesn't think about data structures nor storage issues

Object Oriented Language Characteristics

• Abstract data types, encapsulation, data hiding
• Inheritance
• Polymorphism, run-time binding

Logic Languages

• Fact and rule driven
• Relations instead of functions