It's a tie between Julia and Nim for me. Both have a high-level, readable syntax while also being natively very very fast.

Julia is great for exploratory numerical/scientific computing, e.g., AI, simulations, etc. It especially has amazing math syntax and unicode character support, making for really elegant math code.

Nim is a systems programming language, and I've been starting using it for embedded systems lately. I think it could be really good for running machine learning on embedded devices, as C/C++ are kinda miserable for that, but MicroPython is way too slow and not well suited for production embedded systems imo. Plus it compiles to C and C++, so you can compile it and run it on any device for which you have a working C or C++ toolchain.

I like R because most everything is vectorized out of the box, and you can subset multiple ways. You can do stuff like

a = c(1,2,3,4)
a - 1 # 0,1,2,3
a < 3 # T,T,F,F
a + a # 2,4,6,8
a[a < 3] # 1,2

Also map (“apply” functions in R) is implemented very intuitively, and R discourages you from doing anything object oriented.

Oh my favorite is Crystal. It's a statically compiled dialect of ruby.

It supports:

• Most of the ruby goodness: custom DSLs, patching classes/mixins (monkey patching instances is not supported)
• Compile time type checking (but it also uses duck typing)
• Coroutines / fibers that work across multiple threads (multi-thread support is still experimental, but from my experience works well)
• Possible to create small self-contained binaries (like go-Lang apps).

As much as I love the expressiveness of crystal, there are a few cons:

• It's slow to compile. Due to the dynamic nature of the language, the compiler needs to parse a lot of files (think C/C++) before it creates a binary.
• The number of libraries is very immature at the moment. Crystal is a young language and is missing support for things like aws.
• The library management mechism (called "shards" akin to ruby gems) is not great (in my opinion). There are helpful tools to create the scaffolding, but if you're pretty much stuck with the defined structure. For example you cannot have a single git repo that provides a library and an application that uses it.

Other than that, the type checking but with ruby-like syntax is awesome!

edit: fixed formatting

10 print: "Basic"
20 goto 10

Run

That's about as far as I got :-)

Clojure. I not only get to use a functional language but also get to use all the libraries written for an actually popular language (Java, or JS for ClojureScript). Altough I'd choose something else if functional programming should ever catch on.

I'm probably the black sheep here, but I love Kotlin. It has the best parts of strong typed, object oriented languages and functional languages. Though I feel like it being designed to be bytecode compatible with Java really limits its applications. Even though they have a scripting language version of it, it really doesn't perform well as a scripting language because you need to compile it. I find myself always using Python for scripts instead.

Currently Zig. It really is "better C", and i like C.

Otherwise it would be Erlang, but it does not suit what i want to do now.

Can't believe I scrolled all the way down and didn't find Scala. It's the only language with decent traction that beautifully and elegantly combines functional programming and object oriented programming. Scala makes it such that the language does not limit you into a certain paradigm. You can translate your algorithm in your mind into code regardless of how you thought of it. Incredibly flexible where you need it to be.

Perl. I can use it after awhile away without having to look up how to do things. It adapts to the best style for what I need to do.

HTML 4, cause I leaned it in 1998 when I was 10 and it's the only language I know (besides English) .

Scala. Multiparadigm. A touch of OO is nice in the functional world.

No one else said it… I like Java, and more than the language all the tools available around it. They have been adding to the language to cut down on the traditional verboseness, and it can even natively compile now** some of the time.

The tools are also great, with Springboot for web services and jOOQ for databases, you can very quickly have a web app with strong typed database objects.

FORTH, but not because I actually use it regularly. A stack-based zero-operand postfix language? Every routine/word you define is like solving a puzzle.