If you replace "installed everywhere" with "reasonably easy to install", there are interesting alternatives among the Lisp dialects. Especially as Python has be

If you replace "installed everywhere" with "reasonably easy to install", there are interesting alternatives among the Lisp dialects. Especially as Python has become a lot more similar to Lisp with many of the additions in Python3. Things these languages do have in common with Python3 are: - support for keyword arguments and optional arguments - support for objects and interfaces (but not necessarily for inheritance) - handling of names in scopes and name spaces - closures and lambdas - list comprehensions - arbitrarily long integers, complex numbers, a numeric tower - an empty sequence or empty string is logically false (with a few nuances) - low-level bit operations (often down to a very low level such as popcount in C) - easy to call into C code (or Java code if it runs on the JVM) - full unicode support - conditional expressions like (a if boolval else b) - type annotations - string formatting forms a mini-language - print is a function - hexadecimal, octal, and binary literals - tools for iteration and first-class functions, like partial application - support for OOP In addition to this, the members of the Lisp family usually have as well: - strong support for functional programming - full and efficient garbage collection - persistent data structures - compile to machine code (native code generation or JIT compilation) - a powerful macro system - capability to define custom control constructs - support for pattern matching to members of compound objects, similar to (a, b) = name[:2] - often very good support for parallelism What exactly would be suited best depends IMO on the use case. I think Racket is ideal for easy learning, a platform-independent GUI, and comprehensive documentation, and is also useful fir science applications. It can also interact well with C libraries (or, more generally native libraries with C interface), and it is good for scripting. Clojure is ideal for server applications with a lot of concurrency and a high performance. Its concurrency support is brilliant and best-in-class, much better than Python. Common Lisp / SBCL is somewhat under-hyped in comparison to Clojure, yet it has an excellent performance, integrates well with C libraries, has a highly interactive repl, a comprehensive library system (quicklisp), a standard build system (asdf), comprehensive documentation for beginners (common Lisp cookbook), it is very usable for scripting, has standard pthreads-like concurrency primitives, a powerful object system, and then some more.