The article is pretty light. I don't think it necessarily does any harm, but I think the article kind of misses the mark if you are someone that is really face

The article is pretty light. I don't think it necessarily does any harm, but I think the article kind of misses the mark if you are someone that is really faced with this issue. I would argue that picking the language also depends very much on the domain/platform/target you are writing software for. Is it a web application? Is it a desktop GUI app? Is it an RIA -- for web or desktop? Is it a scientific application that needs great math libraries? What are the performance characteristics? Does it need cross-platform support? Is it a distributed business enterprise system? Is it an embedded system? Is it a library? Do you want the library to be able to be used by many different platforms and languages? Does it have to integrate with other systems and what languages are those written in? What about 5 years down the road -- how do you think it will evolve? Most likely -- answering the question on what the domain/platform/target will be will trim you to a very short-list of options. For example, if you are programming for an embedded system, you may have to use C because that's the only language you'll find compiler support for. Maybe there will be a C++ compiler -- but whether or not you choose it can depend on a lot of factors such as whether your team is comfortable with C++/OO...whether you even want to utilize OO...whether you can afford the additional memory/complexity associated with the features of C++...etc.