They may not be the most important, but they have a big impact on our ability to map the domain/problem into a solution, and it has an impact on the ability to

They may not be the most important, but they have a big impact on our ability to map the domain/problem into a solution, and it has an impact on the ability to maintain the solution when the requirements change (either the domain has changed, the users need a solution to a slightly different problem, etc.). Being able to understand the domain and map it into a solution for a particular problem has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. That's up to the individual company/team/developer to handle. Programming languages are useful in the sense that once a solution has been decided on, they can help to express it in a clear way. In fact, look at Clojure as an example. Even if you have a fantastic understanding of the problem, domain, and (high-level) solution, implementing it in Java can still be problematic, as Rich discovered. Getting concurrency right without having problems with race conditions and deadlocks can consume enormous amounts of time. Having a language that makes concurrency easier (Clojure) means that you can spend more time focusing on the actual problem to be solved, than with low-level implementation details. Also, another thing to keep in mind is that often times a good way to understand a problem and its domain is to try to write a solution, and then see where it falls short, and re-write it, etc. This prototyping phase can be helped by good languages. So maybe programming languages aren't the most important aspect in programming, but it's definitely important enough that it shouldn't be considered bike-shedding.