What are the strengths/purposes of the following programming languages?

Is this a homework question?

If you want advice on which language to use for a project, try to describe the project instead.

Ruby is a language. Ruby on Rails is a Framework written in Ruby. And UNIX is a operating system.

not a homework question. I’m just curious as to what you would normally use these languages for.

I would also classify cocoa and carbon as frameworks, not programming languages.

C: embedded systems, operating systems, realtime systems
PHP: web development
Java: multi-purpose, I’ve seen it used for all kinds of random stuff
...
starts getting tired of answering this question

Perhaps you could just look at what is popular right now and look them up in wikipedia.

MATLAB!