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?

I don't understand why more people aren't concerned with improving the tools they use every day
Because they think compilers are somehow magical and mysterious entities. One of (many) somewhat-sluggish projects has been to write a better C compiler, one that generates code closer to how an assembly language programmer would write it---by necessity, not by pattern.

* Automate profiling of generated machine code. Select constructs that give the best performance based upon empirical data collected from are large set test runs.
MSVC has PGO, which is not bad, but is a bit of a pain to use and thus not used much except in special cases. Optimisation should be more "ubiquitous", not a special-case thing to be applied after you discover that things aren't quite right. I know they still teach that "premature optimisation" bullshit; but going back to change something that's been written already is a waste of resources. Optimisation should be integrated into design, thought of as "what's the best way to do this" throughout so that the final product doesn't need much more done to it.

>>151
That quote may be true for those who don't understand fundamentals like binary and machine instructions, but being clever---and thorough with the design---when writing code can in many cases completely avoid ever having to debug it, as you will have essentially proved it correct before ever running it.

>>156
Whatever you call it, it's become ubiquitous for websites for a reason. The same with all the other languages you complain about. "Purity" or whatever you want to call it has no real practical advantage. Pragmatism does.