How to choose the right language
makecheck: Speed of execution and expressiveness are common factors, and this depends on what you're doing.  For instance, regular expressions.  If you're doing a program that is primarily not dealing with text, but occasionally needs a regex, then Python regexes would be fine.  If the program does a lot of text processing, it should probably use Perl, due to the performance and built-in syntax.  And if the entire program is a simple filter, "sed" is even better than the Perl sledgehammer.The standard library can be a big factor.  Not having to download a dependency is a big win, which is why large standard libraries such as Python can often be better than something like a CPAN dependency in Perl.  It can be the difference between using C++ or Objective-C, versus C.  But more generally, if you need to do X, and you already know how to do it with language Y, you'll need a really good reason to try a different language.