The language as physical tool metaphor is meaningless as far as I'm concerned. Physical tools and programming languages have very little in common. The reason so much is written about programming languages on HN and Reddit is because a language shapes the way you think and anything that alters your way of thinking is a serious matter. Some are expressive, others are not. In that sense a programming language has more in common with a political ideology or religion than something found in a garden shed. That's why programmers - at least those with a soul intact after x years in a Java shop - often obsess over the pros and cons of a programming language. To a craftsman it matters.

DHH once made an excellent defence of programmers as writers rather than engineers and it's perhaps no coincidence that the language he was referring to has ancestry with Perl which was designed by a linguist. Try Clojure/Lisp sometime if you haven't already. Then you'll experience programming as closer to expressive linguistic art than engineering.

My first programming language was Perl and I had to choose between Java and Perl at the time. If you haven't read Larry Wall's "Programming Perl" I recommend it regardless of the status of Perl in the current scene. It's a classic, written in a warm, witty style. 5 minutes with Deitel and Deitel's turgid Java tome and I was sold on Perl. The point I'm making is that choosing Perl over Java as my first language made a huge difference to how I programme today having learned many languages since. I still keep my use of objects to a minimum, prefer functional over OOP and love Clojure with a passion.

Sorry, "just a tool" is meaningless.