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?

than learn a few (even two would suffice) languages that would together cover the same field
The point here is easy integration. For whatever reason, language designers often think their language exists in a void and no one else should be using anything other than their language. If they think otherwise, then almost always, access to "outsider" languages is "at a distance", via an API. Take Python as an example. I haven't used it, but a quick search reveals things like http://docs.python.org/extending/extending.html that shows you need to go through an elaborate process just to write a few lines in an alternate language.

An exact opposite example would be asm { } blocks in C/C++. If I'm writing C and want to manually optimise some parts, I can put in an asm { ... } right there. Trying to put some C in Python, or even Asm in Python? No easy way. You have to go through the whole process above. It's complex enough to be discouraging for simple cases, reducing the opportunities that programmers have.

I may seem biased towards C/C++, but that's naturally because I'm an experienced long-time user and understand the entire process behind its design. And yet, like >>68 mentions, I have not used all the features of C++ like advanced templating. I've found that those who complain about it don't understand why it's the way it is. Once you understand how C++ maps to C, you might find it quite interesting and enlightening. Again, it allows you to choose the level of abstraction you want. I can use cout if I feel... "classy" and want to use the (IMHO bloated) OOP output, printf if I want to be C-like, and int 128 function 4 if I want to be as thin as possible and hit the kernel directly.

True utility comes from being able to solve the problem in the way you want, not the way the language designer enforces. Also remember that programming languages are tools, and like physical tools, acquire dirt and wear from use. The only perfect, clean tool is one that is never used.