Good point. There could be a language that made 0 trade-offs "that matter" vs all other languages. The problem remains that there will likely still exist at l

Good point. There could be a language that made 0 trade-offs "that matter" vs all other languages. The problem remains that there will likely still exist at least one person for whom some trade-off of little or no substance is important (even essential). When people talk about power, elegance and abstraction of a language (not compiler, VM, libraries, etc) they are talking about the language platformed on the human brain (something unique to the individual). Ruby targets a certain brain platform while C targets a different one and Scala yet another. Twitter engineers sound like they have brains appropriate for both Ruby and Scala. Scala makes less technical trade-offs toward their end and so there arises a clear winner (for them). The day we're all using the same brain platform then there could be argued to exist a best language.