I have always held that the act of programming is something that is done in an abstract realm and only later translated into a programming language. That programming should involve much more thinking than actual writing.

I mostly still stand by that but my years as a readability reviewer at Google raised my awareness of the fact that it takes time and practice to use a language well. Many were the hopeful C++ programmers who wrote fully functional and reasonably object-oriented code in Java but with a heavy C++ accent that couldn't quite meet the bar of elegance in Java (even if a C++ programmer might think it mostly elegant apart from the "flaws" of Java).

So how much does the choice of programmimg language matter? Is there or could there be a language that could be considered perfect?