... Perl ...... Python ...
I can't say as I recall one of these my-language/your-language discussions ending well at any point in the last 35 years. It's very close to arguing if my life philosophy is better than yours. I think it might be better, if people want to go down that path, to broaden the discussion into one closer to comparative religion.
I very much enjoyed, and still do, in depth comparative language study. When the computer science community was much less tightly connected - so that the opportunities for network effects were much weaker - there were dozens and dozens of really fascinating programming languages micro-lanaguages for specific domains.
Some of my favorites...
SETL (NY University) was pretty amazing. It pretty much only had hash tables. After a while they managed to get's compiler so elegant that it started to automatically optimize programs into algorithms that a few years before had seemed to be serious inventions - for example it could discover spanning tree based algorithms. As far as I know this branch of elegance has died out. There was a very amusing moment when the SETL folks wrote an Ada compiler years before anybody else managed to get one written.
Simula ( which was cira 1968, had all the modern tools for writing object oriented multi-threaded programs. Almost all the neat ideas in Simula were reinvented every 2-3 years till today. This tradition is probably still alive in ELang (which takes a light dose of Prolog-fu as well). I can't too highly recommend a study of the ELang light-wieght threading model to people working on distributed systems.
The SNOBOL .. ICON (University of Arizona) had some very nice ideas about how to manage the control stack of a program to get search, iteration, pattern-matching. There was a very interesting language in this line that broke the act of calling a function into it's component parts (binding, dispatching, returning etc.) and then managed to let you compose those to create iteration generators etc.
I enjoyed working on a number of graphic layout languages. DOT is one of the modern examples.
I bet some other people here know of some sweet historical examples.
Etc. etc. etc.
