Depends on a number of factors for me. If it's a small, well-defined project, just go with whatever you're happiest in. If it's a large project or a large com

Depends on a number of factors for me. If it's a small, well-defined project, just go with whatever you're happiest in. If it's a large project or a large company, then go with who you can hire (eg. Java, C#, etc.) Actual language/subject matter practicality is a relatively minor consideration in comparison. You're usually talking about some sort of performance/dev-time/cost tradeoff and short developer time almost always wins. So small projects go with a quick happy language, big projects go with a "enterprise" language designed for large teams. Ultimately they're both about reducing the total devtime. It's very rare for any particular task to be tightly coupled to a language. I can only really think of a couple, Erlang and SQL. Maybe C/C++ for high perf jobs. Otherwise, since all Turing-complete languages can technically do anything any other can, you're probably going to waste more time fiddling about in a new language that might be more appropriate, than if you just got cracking in your everyday general purpose language. Most considerations beyond the above are probably just going to be people's personal opinions about their favourite language. It's like arguing emacs/vim or tabs/spaces, not going to help much ;)