1 - At a high level, I ask myself if the language is pushing me towards the pit of success or the put of failure. More concretely I ask myself "given the class

1 - At a high level, I ask myself if the language is pushing me towards the pit of success or the put of failure. More concretely I ask myself "given the class of problems appropriate for this language, are good abstractions easier to create than bad abstractions?". If so, I have a positive reaction. If the reverse is true, and it's easier to make bad abstractions (think early Java where functions were not first class), then I have a negative reaction. 2 - If the language is trying to sell you on a certain paradigm? If so, is there a good escape hatch? This at least means a good FFI like that found in Erlang, but also within the language, OCaml's refs which allow you to write imperative code are a great example. Elm is a language that does this badly, 0.19 removed FFIs and the language is much reduced for it. 3. Is packaging a first class consideration of the language? This is one of the places where say, Rust shines and Python really suffers. I'm going to need packages and if managing them is hard I'm going to get mad. 4. Does the language free me from some class of problems? Big positive. Some languages I've liked: Common Lisp, C, OCaml, Haskell, Python2, Javascript ES5, Racket, Erlang Some languages I've disliked: Java5 and earlier, C++, Go, Python3, PHP circa 1999