Elixir has become my go-to language for whipping up new communication utilities. The syntax is comfortable, although I had to get used to a Functional Programming style at first.

What I like most is the language and runtime's features that make parallelization so easy. Spawning threads that are monitored, have their own protected state, that are managed if they crash, and are trivially spread across different machines on the network made it straightforward to write fairly highly available code right from the beginning without a lot of planning.