I guess you're right. The thing is that I usually work with experienced programmers and my impression is, that these people get along with "new" languages very fast. Hence, I stress the following aspects of the comparison:

lines of code (LOC)

time of programming
BTW, this is my prominent argument for Perl. When performance comes into play, I recommend outsourcing the runtime drivers to C (i.e. using XS).

Comment on Re^5: Advice of picking the language for my job, please