I need your experience - classification and comparison of languages

[Yvan Radenac]

Thank you for your posts, it's the first time i use the news and my
english is far from perfect.
Thank you for all url you gave me.
It's a good beginning for my report.

I'm interresting in your experience as programmer, responsible of
projects, ....
As i will make a average of all results to obtain something the most
objective i can.

I found some old documents and comparisons (they are written between
1992 and 1997) or very subjective (like Java versus others by Sun,
...).

It seems that the languages the most used will be:
Ada (95), Beta, OCaml, OO COBOL,CLOS, C++, C#, Objective-C, Eiffel,
Java, Modula-3, O Oberon, Object Pascal (like Turbo-Pascal, Delphi,
...), Perl,
Python, Ruby, Sather?, Simula, Smalltalk.

I don't add to this list all the languages that have only a commercial
implementation, like VBA, ...
as i write a report about "oo languages and their public
implementation".

If you think i forget one or more oo common languages, let me know.

The result will be posted under the Free Documentation Licence from
GNU.

Of course, if you want to answer this table, thank you.

Regards
Yvan

Comparison:
----------
It's based on this scale table (to simplify):
Very bad|bad|Correct|Good|Very good|
--------|---|-------|----|---------|
  - -   | - |   O   |  + |   + +   |

Language|Readibility|Writability|Reliability|Cost
--------|-----------|-----------|-----------|----
        |           |           |           |


P.S.: a resume of the criterias, based on a course of The University
of Ottawa by Szpakowicz:
Comparison:
----------
Readability:
  - abstraction, support for generality: procedural abstraction, data
absraction.
  - absence of ambiguity (and of too much choice).
  - Orthogonality: no restrictions on combinations of concepts. For
example, can a procedure parametrer have ANY type? Can EVERYTHING be
evaluated?
  - Expressivity of control and data structures. (Exemples of low
expressive power: machine languages).
  - Appearance: style of comments, ...
Writability:
  - Abstraction and simplicy like readibility.
  - Expressivity, like readibility.
  - Modularity and tools for modularization, support for integrated
programmer's environments.
Reliability:
  - Safety for the programmer (type checking, error and exception
handling, unambiguous naming).
Cost:
  - Development time (ease of programming, availability of code).
  - Efficiency of implementation: how easy it is to build a language
processor.
  - Translation time and quality of object code.
  - Portability and standardization.