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by gcv 4156 days ago
Any modern Lisp gets you there. The three leading dialects, namely Common Lisp, Racket, and Clojure, are all excellent. Each makes different trade-offs in what it offers. As a former Java programmer, you will probably like Clojure's near-perfect Java interop and excellent performance. Racket is probably the best batteries-included language and environment available today. Common Lisp is a bit grandfatherly, but it's the kind of grandfather who teaches you to fly his aerobatics plane. Its condition system, in particular, should be required study to anyone who purports to design languages and runtimes.

I read up and played with Rust earlier this week. It's also excellent, and while it's too young and has been too volatile for libraries to solidify, that will change in the next few months. The tooling (as far as Emacs modes and the dependency/build system, Cargo, are concerned) looks solid. Performance is already decent, and has the potential to eventually match C. To be honest, Rust feels like what Go would have been had its authors understood Lisp and Haskell.