Dystopian Rebel's Journal: Notes On Programming Languages

C
^^^
Favourable: concise; powerful low-level manipulation; very portable; makes programmers learn

Unfavourable: string manipulation is clumsy; no garbage collection; in general, it takes a good programmer to use C well; no OOP, although you can find workarounds, since an object is really just a struct

C++
^^^^
Favourable: like C, but with OOP capability; better string manipulation than C

Unfavourable: string manipulation is still clumsy; some OOP purists dislike multiple inheritance and other "imperfections" of the OOP implementation

Perl
^^^^^
Favourable: easy to get started with; versatile; near-perfect portability; excellent ability to manipulate file-contents

Unfavourable: poverty of data structures; syntax that worsens in proportion to the complexity of the implementation; weirdness with I/O;

Python
^^^^^^^
Favourable: object-oriented; can be compiled;

Unfavourable: some portability problems; clumsy REGEX implementation; white-space is significant to the logic;

Java
^^^^^
Favourable: garbage-collection; good implementation of OOP

Unfavourable: cannot be compiled;