[Inaimathi]

That's the argument I fundamentally disagree with.

It may be true for things like SQL (or PS or the many, many DSLs out there), but general-purpose programming languages are implicitly (perhaps tautologically) supposed to be good for the general case.

It goes without saying that if your list of requirements includes something like "our deployment environment will have 16 kb of memory and an 8 mhz processor and no network interaction", you don't want to use something like Erlang. But except for such extremes (which I probably should have explicitly stated I'm not thinking about), it is possible (and necessary) to distinguish between two languages on the basis of power.

I probably should have just linked to http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html instead of writing anything, because the "Blub Paradox" section makes the above argument much more eloquently.