High Level Languages that aren't shit

Do any exist? I've been looking for something like a high level C. The closest thing is probably Lua, but that's obviously unacceptable. Plus Lua is more C++ and less C. I liked Perl, but Perl 6 is not so good and has left a bad taste in my mouth.

>>56
Yeah, I'm already pretty good with MATLAB/Octave. Used it in college a lot. I worked with R a little bit, but again I was put off by some of the odd syntax.

I'll try out the suggestions in this thread (other than Python, I already tried it out). Also, why do you guys recommend Common Lisp? I was going to use Scheme so I could learn it with SICP.