Choosing the best suited language

But its got to be done in Jaavaa! (or .NET or VB or whatever)

No, Dr. Dre, you need to choose what's the most suitable language to solve the problem. Believe it or not, the complexity of the application changes dramatically with a language that thinks differently from the problem class at hand.

For example, consider a simple app that converts strips non-ASCII characters by converting them to their ASCII counterparts.

Lets say your manager loves BASIC and writes it as below

OPEN "unstripped" FOR INPUT AS #1
OPEN "stripped" FOR OUTPUT AS #2
WHILE NOT EOF(1)
     a$ = INPUT$(1, 1)
     n = ASC(a$)
     IF n > 127 THEN
           PRINT #2, CHR$(ASC(a$) - 128);
     ELSE
           PRINT #2, a$;
     END IF
WEND
CLOSE
END

That is quite reasonable, isn't it? You could probably write something equivalent in C, Java or related languages.
Yes, but look how much simpler it would be if Perl was chosen as the language of choice.

perl -pe 'y/\x80-\xff/\x00-\x7f/'

Its a one liner you type on the command line. For text processing, Perl tends to beat any other language.