After having read a lot of these types of language debates, the only conclusions I can safely arrive at are 1) that every language has its advocates and 2) some

After having read a lot of these types of language debates, the only conclusions I can safely arrive at are 1) that every language has its advocates and 2) some people are highly productive in their preferred language, much more so than the average programmer would be in their preferred language. But the real question, imho, is how do average programmers compare? How will the same app written in C++ and Java compare, when written by non-superstars? The question merits some empirical research.