I think it's fair to look at language features as benefits and drawbacks in languages, as long as you're aware of what those features have to offer, and what th

I think it's fair to look at language features as benefits and drawbacks in languages, as long as you're aware of what those features have to offer, and what the costs are. It makes sense to want a way to judge languages not on the presence or absence of particular features, but on their ability to achieve some goal. But what should the goal be? Popularity? Lowest time required to write programs, or to read them? Approachability for new users, or convenience for experts? Utility for writing fast programs, or for writing programs fast? You can specialize languages down to the point where there's a different best answer for every possible goal, but because I don't want to maintain fluency in 50 different languages, I'm most interested in languages that do very well in a wide variety of ways. If you want to get down to figuring out where the trade-offs really are, and which goals can be achieved simultaneously, you can't take the attitude that every language is just great at being itself. You have to allow for the possibility that some languages really would be better all around with the addition or alteration of certain features.