Any decent modern general-purpose languages?

Assembly: Unportable. No standardised syntax.
Classical Visual Basic: Some good parts. Shit overall.
C: Shitty standard library. Deficient type system. Can't into Unicode. ``Unportable assembly.''
D and C++: Obfuscated boilerplate languages.
Java and C#: Forced OOP.
Common Lisp: Archaic cons-based library. Writing complex macros is a PitA due to the unlispy quotation syntaxes.
Scheme: CL without namespaces.
Clojure and Erlang: Concurrency is unneeded outside of a few very specific applications. Parallelism is where it's at.
OCaml: Great language, only one, deficient, implementation.
Haskell: Academic sex toy.
Forth: Reinventing the wheel over and over.
Ruby: Implicit declarations. Slow as fuck.
Python: Implicit declarations. FioC.
Perl: Brain damage.
PHP: Pretty much shit.
JavaScript: "" == false

It's impossible to list them all but, please, what decent modern general-purpose languages exist?

>>84
Compilers don't do magic. They follow a set of rules like any software to turn common constructs into tighter code.

Depending on the set of optimization algorithms they employ, they can appear to be magical.

But compilers are not aware of the context of the problem you're trying to solve, or the algorithm you're trying to express.

Then you are using the wrong language. You should only express the program as a minimally described idea. The compiler can then find an implementation of the idea that obtains an optimal efficiency on that target architecture and platform.

Suppose you're in a very hot block of code. You find a more clever solution than the ASM output. That's where you use inline assembly.

I'd rather let my genetic peep hole simulated annealing optimizer run on it with test input for two days.