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?

>>172
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.
People are probably just either satisfied with suboptimal machine code generation or they don't know any better.
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.
This would be very nifty. The only implementation strategy for machine code generation I've seen so far is to simply convert syntactical constructs to a stream of equivalent instructions and apply a series of optimizations that maintain equivalence throughout the process. Albeit, there can be other things going on like using a minimum amount of registers. In the whole process, the compiler doesn't really know what you are trying to do. It's just spitting out machine code it knows is equivalent to the higher level source code you gave it, and then simplifying it a bit. An optimizing compiler tries to find a highest performing program within the equivalence class of the program the programmer submitted. So it applies all these operations that it knows preserve equivalence, but will likely improve performance.

It seems like in order for the compiler to truly generate assembly with necessity, it would need to have a complete high level understanding of what you are trying to do. But as soon as I start to think about whether this is possible, or already implemented, it feels like it comes down to a philosophical question. If I turn the steering wheel of my car to the left, does my car realize that I want to go left, and turns its wheels by necessity? Or is it just doing what the mechanical engineer designed it to do, which was to allow rotation of the steering wheel was to directly affect the wheels?