>>1
Haskell. It's the most sensible route. I've experienced like three bugs in 700 lines of code. It's also great for concurrency, which is important these days. There's a main implementation (GHC) which you can rely on, and you don't have to bother worrying about writing "portable" code to work across different implementations. New, useful stuff is added all the time to GHC. Haskell has a great and very active community--constantly growing; a good, fast compiler; lots of libraries; and a friendly and helpful IRC channel. It is compiled, and also can be interpeted. It supports debugging (stack trace and the like), and excellent unit testing (quickcheck). Haskell libraries and programs can be built out of composable parts which is great for software re-usability. People are using Haskell in Real Life™ in real commercial applications. It's became justifiable to my boss and my friends. It's taught by the
elite universities. Prof. Dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra approved of Haskell. Also, read SICP.