I also firmly believe that "easy to write but slow languages" sets up a false dilemma. Haskell, JavaScript and C# are all fairly instructive examples. Haskell

I also firmly believe that "easy to write but slow languages" sets up a false dilemma. Haskell, JavaScript and C# are all fairly instructive examples. Haskell for demonstrating the level of flexibility you can achieve with a really well-thought-out static type system. JavaScript for showing how much of the "dynamic tax" you can avoid at run-time with an aggressive enough JIT compiler. C# for showing that you can get a pretty nice final result out of pragmatically blending a little bit of dynamic typing and a little bit of the ML-style static typing experience into a language that started out with a Java-style type system.