I am looking for a methodology for choosing a language. I am not asking for opin

Question

I am looking for a methodology for choosing a language. I am not asking for opinions about languages. I have been tasked with the process of comparing our shop's current language with others that are available. We are a web development shop btw.

Our CEO would like a full white paper about all web based languages that are available, What parent language they are derivatives of (e.g jsp is from java which is from c/c++). I need to create a matrix with all the key factors of a particular language as well and the short comings of that given language. Is the language limited by platform, is it designed for functional programming, procedural or OO or can it be used with any programming paradigm?

I also need to have information less technical, like the size of the talent pool for a given language and the median salary in that pool. How will the marketplace view our choice?

We started looking for a consultant to help us understand all of these things but what we have found it that most consultants are coming from a development background and often it seems that the answer is "xxx is the best language because it is the one that I have used the most over the last n years and it has never let me down. You could Supplement it with yyy for front end and use zzz library"

I am feeling overwhelmed with this task and I feel like the best course of action, given what our CEO is looking for, is to look in the world of academia and hire a professor with no actual development experience to come in and "teach" us about all possible languages.

Has anyone else had to go through this exercise? If you have can you share the steps and/or methodology you used to go through the process?

Explanation / Answer

I suspect the CEO is looking for irrefutable, objective evidence which will support his choice of language. The problem is that preference of language is loaded with far too many subjective and extrinsic factors for the white-paper to be meaningful let alone useful.

Put another way, if there were an ideal language, everyone would be using it instead of those "objectively" defective languages. It also bespeaks a degree of micromanagement that ought be the province of the engineers who will have to make it work. Erlang might be the "objectively best" but if no one knows it, add a 6 month/engineer start up cost and 6 more month / engineer to gain competency.

Since I don't have your job, I'm not worried about losing it, although you may. I'd give the CEO a paper on the Physical Church-Turing Thesis. I'd then get together with the senior engineers and get their non-rigorous, non-objective opinion as to what should be used and tell the CEO that's what you shall use. In exchange you'll promise the engineers will keep out of board meetings, CFOs, Accountancy Methods, selection of VPs and so on. There is a reason we specialize, and he has no more place in engineering preferences than you do in his domain.

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