I suggest taking a long, hard look at Julia. It's squarely aimed at high performance numerics and scientific programming, but is in fact a general purpose lang

I suggest taking a long, hard look at Julia. It's squarely aimed at high performance numerics and scientific programming, but is in fact a general purpose language with great potential. It's already very, very efficient (written using LLVM), yet has a lot of the clean elegance of Python.