Well, I dragged this for too long. Now I have to pick the language for the next project. My language of choice is C++, but there are some serious motivation for using Java, one is that all of the junior programmers involved has some experience of Java, another is that middle management is biased toward Java. So, I can still chose C++, but I have to put forward strong and sound engineering reasons. Also because this can become a little … political. I mean – should the project be late for “natural” development reason, or whatever other reason, I don’t want to be blamed because I decided for a language perceived as complicated and rough.
The application isn’t going to need machoFlops or be resource intensive, therefore performance-wise there is no reason to avoid Java.
Java has a thorough and complete library, quite homogeneous even if not always well designed.
I consider C++ to be more flexible and expressive, but is there a more demonstrable software engineering property of C++ that I can use in my argumentations to favor the choice of this language?
(Or conversely is there any demonstrable advantage of Java the could convince me to switch my language of choice).