Have a look at OCaml. For simple standalone binaries it's a real sweet spot: it's powerful and safe without being complex. It has the best module system going and a mature open-source ecosystem, and in the last few years it's converged on a good package/dependency manager. There's a great series of blog posts from someone who looked at replacements for Python and ultimately moved to OCaml, summarized at http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml-ret...