'To say "every language design has its own set of tradeoffs" implies that all languages are equal' I don't think that implication is there at all. It absolute

'To say "every language design has its own set of tradeoffs" implies that all languages are equal' I don't think that implication is there at all. It absolutely doesn't hold for strong notions of equality - strong equality of all languages should imply that they all share a single set of tradeoffs. It also clearly doesn't hold for "equal suitability to any purpose", since something less suitable to the purpose may be traded off for something more suitable. I think any general notion of "equality of quality" can probably be viewed as a special case of the above reasoning - we are picking a set of attributes, of benefits and drawbacks - but we've no guarantee that they all net out the same however we are measuring them.