You know, the picture becomes to come into focus to me. I suspect due to the prevalence of the saying "Languages don't have performance, only implementations do" and people constantly slagging on benchmarks without thought, simply reflexively, and probably helped by a healthy dose of both fanboyism and instinctive revulsion to fanboyism, programmers are apparently nearly completely incapable of having a reasonable discussion about which languages are faster than other, at what tasks, under what circumstances.
Well, that's a pity, because there is such a discussion to be had, and a lot of people are getting hurt because of their inability to get good information on this topic, and consequently making perfectly-avoidable bad decisions. Absolute statements are hard to come by, sure, but there are engineeringly-useful guidelines that you can discover if you examine the problem space.
I try to imagine a discussion between carpenters about chisels, saws or hammers and each having a favourite brand that they'd defend to the death in order to avoid an objective discussion about what the good and bad properties of each tool are.
Where there is choice people will complain about the choices of others.
After all, programming languages are just tools. What really matters is the applications you create with them, and that people will find your application useful and use it with pleasure.
Up to that point it is just your preference.