Which language/platform to develop desktop application based on following criteria [closed]

Question

Faced with the challenge of a new application with which you had free reign to design, assemble a team to develop and manage:

1. Which language/platform would you choose?
2. Why?

Background: The desktop application will control a hardware device and perform computations, analyze and display the data returned by it.

Requirements: (importance: 10=most important)

• will need to communicate with devices using USB and/or ethernet (9)
• availability of engineers with relevant skills (8)
• availability of quality IDE/tools (8)
• cost of IDE/tools (7)
• availability of resources, tutorials, support (9)
• lifetime of language/API/platform/framework- ie how future-proof will the investment in this application be?... the product has a long life-cycle (10)
• cross-platform (3)
• richness and breadth of libraries available (9)
• the application will need to be able to interpret a scripting language (6)
• unit testing (9)

Assumptions:

• For USB variants of the device, a device driver will be written in C/C++
• Application will be a completely new endeavor - from scratch
• Background of existing engineers is C/C++, and they have a strong OO competence. Existing engineers are willing to adopt best language/platform, and new engineers with appropriate skills will be recruited.

Shortlist (which you can add to):

• Java/J2SE
• C#/.NET
• C++/wxWidgets
• C++/QT
• etc.

Looking forward to hearing what you think!

Answer 1

To be honest, I'd choose Java (with a small component of C) for the following reasons, based on your requirements.

• Lifetime of language/API/platform/framework- i.e., how future-proof will the investment in this application be?... the product has a long life-cycle (10). That really depends on what you mean by long. I seriously can't imagine Java disappearing, simply due to its huge installed base. C or C++ isn't disappearing either but I always think of the VB6-to-VB.net migration issues when contemplating the future of C#.

• Will need to communicate with devices using USB and/or ethernet (9). Whilst Java isn't directly ideal for this, it has JNI to do the grunt work. You'll still need a C component to do this (and it will change for each platform but it's better to have the bulk of your code write-once - with C, you'll probably have most of your code changing for each platform, and with C#, well, is it really supported on platforms other than Windows?). Another alternative is JNA which looks like a "Python ctypes" for Java (access to shared libraries and DLLs without the JNI interfacing layer).

• Availability of resources, tutorials, support (9). All the languages have a huge resource cross-section on the web.

• Richness and breadth of libraries available (9). You have Boost for C++ and cross-platform GUIs but they're something that has to be added - there's nothing built in to the development environment like with Eclipse/Java.

• Unit testing (9). Same response as availability of tools below - there are plenty of (free) Eclipse plug-ins that automate unit testing.

• Availability of engineers with relevant skills (8). All the languages you mention have a plethora (I love using that word) of people able to do the job.

• Availability of quality IDE/tools (8). This is Eclipse. No two ways about it, in my mind. The number of plug-ins for it is truly immense. NetBeans may look nicer but I'd rather have functionality than looks (and so would my wife, so that's lucky :-).

• Cost of IDE/tools (7). Eclipse is free.

• The application will need to be able to interpret a scripting language (6). Last I heard, Java now includes JavaScript as a built-in as well as the ability for developers to add their own scripting engines.

• Cross-platform (3). C#, no (despite the existence of Mono, I still see risks that it will fall afoul of MS one day, and that not many is the FOSS world will work on it due to its MS associations).