No, this chapter does not announce the winner of the programming language competition. I'm not even attempting to compare the languages side by side. You will have noticed anyway which languages I find more interesting. This chapter just captures some thoughts that came to my mind when collecting the information about the programming languages describes in this book.
How much should a programming language guide a developer's thinking? Some of the languages clearly favor a specific paradigm, for example, Eiffel object-orientation and Haskell functional programming. Others are more open, most notable Lisp which has been able to swallow all the paradigms of the last 40 years (functional, procedural, object-oriented, meta-programming).
In my opinion, we are currently observing a convergence of the major approaches to programming. There is definitely a renaissance of functional programming after the object-oriented era. Object-orientation as a means to control state (and side effects) is good, but avoiding side effects wherever possible is better. I guess it is fair to say, that the C family is adding more and more features from the functional world. Just think about variable declarations anywhere in the code (almost a let expression), C#'s delegates and Java's inner classes (almost first class function objects and closures).
The modern scripting languages, Python and Ruby, are going into the same direction. Python's list comprehensions (adopted from Haskell), nested scopes, and iterators render a number of procedural constructs obsolete. Ruby started with a more functional approach (everything is an expression) from the very beginning. Python is still ahead in terms of "callable objects".