Can I suggest trying Groovy (properly, not in the form of hacking together gradle or jenkins scripts, but as an application language)? It's basically what you

Can I suggest trying Groovy (properly, not in the form of hacking together gradle or jenkins scripts, but as an application language)? It's basically what you want but unlike the other "dead" languages it is designed to complement Java rather than compete with it and is unlikely to ever become obsolete for that reason.