[speedgoose]

If you are chasing the best performances for desktop applications. You shouldn't really look at Python alternatives. In my opinion, JavaScript and Chrome performs quite well in practice. Plenty of successful apps use that kind of stack with good performances.

CLI in JavaScript wouldn't be my first choice, Python would, but some people do that too.

If you want to take a break from the languages at work, maybe learn a language for fun. Ruby is great and fun to learn. Golang is quite quick to learn if you don't have much time. Rust is my personal favourite but it's more challenging. And then you have all those exotic programming languages or some with different paradigms.