Absolute necessity: Garbage collection Built-in (or included library) types: string, integer, decimal (precise, not floating-point), boolean, list, dictionary

Absolute necessity: Garbage collection Built-in (or included library) types: string, integer, decimal (precise, not floating-point), boolean, list, dictionary If statically typed, generics First-class, anonymous and inline functions, as well as closures, or at least some convenient way to imitate these Really, really nice to have: If statically typed, type inference List and dictionary literals Consistent naming of all included code Operator overloading Map/select and filter/where functions on built-in list type (preferably all the functions of IEnumerable in .NET and then some) If it wasn't obvious from that list, my favorite language is C# (at least version 3.5 or newer).