Programming languages is after all a popularity contest.
I am not so sure.
Why are you not so sure? I've seen too many things fall in and out of fashion to say that one tool is superior to the others - things like Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python, COBOL, BASIC, Pascal, Go, Delphi, Smalltalk, Fortran, LISP, PL/1, C++, Visual Basic, C#, PL/SQL, SQL Forms, AWK/sed and so on, endless GUI programming environments, endless different IDEs, different design methodologies JSP, three-tiered applications, data driven development, design patterns, functional programming languages, Agile, blah, blah, blah,,
Some of the languages bring new things to the table, and others take them away. None of them solve the core problem that programming is hard, and any programming language that is expressive enough to be useful makes it easy to write buggy code.
Just look through any programmers bookshelf who is older than 40 - the only books of value are anything on algorithms and the K+R ANSI C book. For all the others, at the time they were purchased they were considered important to spend real money, now they are junk.
In general it isn't the tools you use that determine results, it is the people who use them. It is a fact of life that 50% of projects will get sub-average results, and a great team with only shoddy tool-sets will outshine a shoddy team with the best tools.
So if I need something done, and it is appropriate, give me a good C programmer and let him use it's unbounded arrays, pointers, and while() loops. Heck, they can even use "goto"s for trapping errors if they must.
Just don't give me an sub-average programmer and demand that they use a tool-set that is a language designer's wet dream, believing it will give spectacular results. It wont.