Yes, it is pointless, because there is no 'best'.<p>Just like I have 5 different hammers in my toolbox (Estwing, benchhammer, rubber hammer, plastic head and lead shot filled) I have a whole bunch of languages in my toolbox too.<p>Picking one is based on what I intend to do with the resulting product, familiarity and the speed with which I wish to get my result. If it is code that will run in production for many years I will pick another language than if it is a quick-and-dirty I need the answer now type thing.<p><i>Every</i> language, your favorite too, has its pros and cons.<p>If there were a single, perfect language I do not doubt that it would overrun the world of programming in the time it would take to spread the news.<p>But languages are trade-offs. Space, speed, readability, maintainability, expressiveness. All of those (and probably more) can be changed enough to give a spectrum of possibilities, and with enough spacing between those in the various dimensions you end up with a large number of viable languages.<p>And that's good. A lisp programmer will solve something in a completely different way from a C programmer or a prolog programmer. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.<p>In the end all that matters is that your solution produces correct results (and not just in the logical sense of 'correct', also correct for all the other parameters).<p>As long as it performs well for you everything else is premature optimization ;)<p>Incidentally, I put out a little challenge on this exact subject:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073333" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073333</a>