I don't buy the "it doesn't matter" part. A good language can effect your project's agility by an order of magnitude; and the gap widens exponentially after you've used it long enough to build up some custom libraries/tools.

Well, it doesn't really matter. If my competitors want to use inferior tools, that's fine with me.

Yeah, but when your partners are using inferior tools, you spend a lot of time waiting. OurDoings integrates with 9 other sites, so this means something to me.

Yeah well with OSS your competitors can end up contributing to the "inferior" platforms instead of to your "superior' platform. Apple/Darwin comes to mind

You're absolutely right. Very good point.

What I meant was that you could build almost anything with almost any language.

This != "it doesn't matter".

(I sometimes react this way because we often debate endlessly over language fine points that are really just personal preference.)

But of course it does matter. The "it doesn't matter" was specific to PHP because PHP has a good record of success.