For me, the only important semantic characteristics of a language are semicolons and curly braces, without them, I have a hard time using it.
I used to do everything in C, but for work, R has tons of bioinfo and biostats packages that are really useful and solid. Since I use it so much at work, it has just become my language of choice for everything from shell scripts to GD modding.
I think everybody needs to pick the language that has the right set of libraries for their purpose.