I am thankful to several people who commented on language issues. Thanks go also to Stig Erik Sandoe for helpful comments. The Hacker FAQ by Eric S. Raymond is another interesting text for novice Linux developers. It concentrates on some cultural and psychological aspects of open source development. A common name of the language.
Beginner Indicates how well suited the language is for people with little programming experience.
Performance How fast your applications are likely to run when you put them into production use. Performance depends more on your algorithmic programming skills than the actual language. Of course it's also not a very reliable or thorough method, but it would give an example how running times in different languages can differ. In object oriented programming, data structures and algorithms are integrated into units, often called classes. More dependent on the tools you are using than the actual language.