Can't say there's one best programming language - it depends on the challenge and you
For me the best solution is the one in which I have to put the least effort and time.
There was a time when I used PHP for everything.
Now for simple get page, calculate something, send response in X seconds I usually use wget + (sed|bc|awk|other gnu tools) or javascript (greasemonkey).
For OCR challs it's usually wget + gocr or Python if gocr can't make it.
Some challenges are just begging me to code in Prolog ;)
And for other it's Python (lambda functions).