Some languages are just better for some things than others.

I usually argue this point, although not very strongly. It seems to me that once you get to a certain subsistence level... once you have associative arrays, dynamic memory allocation, lambda functions, portability, etc... once you're talking about high level langauges... And I usually call them p-languages (perl, pike, php, python, ruby, ... sometimes java) ...

Once you're talking about a very high level language, it's pretty much just a matter of preference. That's why the holy wars seem so pointless. There isn't really any advantage to one over the other (aside from preference) besides metrics like speed, development time, and maintenance cost.

I think if you're a big perl fan you're probably ignoring speed (for certain things). If you're a big java fan you're probably ignoring speed (for certain things). Otherwise we'd all just use C, right?