In my experience, the more interesting reasons to choose languages come from the &quot;platform and ecosystem&quot; categories rather than syntax.<p>Lua:  It has clean, clear syntax but its real value is the implementation, which is geared towards use as an embedded language.<p>Javascript:  The language isn&#x27;t bad but were it not for being the browser scripting language it never would have gotten so popular and tools like node.js probably wouldn&#x27;t even exist.<p>Java:  Native language on the powerful JVM.<p>C&#x2F;C++:  Direct access to various operating system and hardware libraries not available anywhere else.<p>Perl:  Deployed widely on unix systems making it very useful for scripting and system administration.<p>SQL:  For querying relational databases.<p>Granted, within each category, you might have syntax preferences.  I would never use Ruby or Perl if I could use Python, for example.  I prefer JSON for serialization(robust and simple) but for manually encoding a complex data structure, YAML is far more comfortable.  That&#x27;s all syntax.  But picking the right language for a job usually requires going beyond the syntax.