Could you please rank the programming languages in order and give each a score on a scale of 100? Particularly I'm interested in your opinion regarding C/C++, R, JAVA.
I'm going to split up C and C++ (since they really are different languages) and remove C++ from consideration since although I know enough about it theoretically - I haven't done much coding in C++. To replace it I guess I'll toss in Python.
R > Python > C > Java (But really it depends on what you're doing)
R gets a score of Super Awesome / 100. It's very useful for statistics and takes care of a lot of stuff for you. Working with data is a breeze in R compared to other languages and there is package to do pretty much any statistical procedure you can think of. It's perfect for the type of work I do.
Python gets a score of Awesome / 100. There are very useful packages for working with data and integrating with R so doing real stats in Python is pretty easy. It's also much more of a general purpose language when compared to R so it's useful for a heck of a lot of stuff. Its syntax is clean and it provides some real nice syntactical sugar that makes doing certain things a breeze. It's definitely my scripting language of choice.
C gets a score of Useful / 100. C can be a real headache when debugging. Managing your own memory is useful for squeezing the most out of your code but it's really easy to mess up which can result in code that won't compile or something that ends up leaking memory like crazy. The actual language itself is incredibly small but you also don't get a lot of niceties either. If you're looking for speed it's hard to beat but... I try to avoid dropping down to C whenever possible.
Java gets a score of Meh / 100. It was my first real language so it has a special place in my heart. But. you. have. to. be. so. ****. verbose. about. everything. Have you ever seen a Hello World program in Java? Compare that to a Hello World program in R or Python and you'll see what I mean. Java does have nice things though (of course it does! otherwise it wouldn't be as popular as it is). The fact that you don't actually run the code on your machine is nice - you run everything in the java virtual machine which is what makes it possible to write cross platform code in Java so easy. There's also a library for EVERYTHING in Java. The problem is that this causes some people to not think too hard about their code so they end up importing a HUGE library just to do a simple simple task. This is partially what gives people the impression that Java is slow.