what is the best language to do this in?

I have a set of data:
Sally has attribute A and attribute B
Bob has attribute D and attribute R
John has attribute S and attribute T
Melissa has attribute G and attribute M

etc.  There are over 300 names and 21 different attributes (let's call them A, B, ..., T, U) in varying combinations.

I want to pick out a set of 5 names with 2 attributes each that fit in a pattern of (for example) A,B,C,D,E,F,H,I,J,K

What's the best way to go about this?  I'm programming language neutral, though I do have some experience in bash, python and perl.  It would have to take input from a text file (either tab delimited or csv) and output which names to pick and what their attributes are.

Languages don't really matter for something like this as much as the data structure you hold the names in. It also depends how many *times* you want to do this. If you're doing it once, just search naively: it's the fastest you'll get. Otherwise, you're better off storing names that have a certain attribute together than storing the names as a hashmap to their attributes.