I consider OCaml the baseline for what a language from the last 20-or-so years should be. It doesn't do much that really pushes boundaries, but it has all the basic things you want and no major blunders (which is a surprisingly rare thing). In particular it has a sensible type system with proper algebraic types (which so many languages manage to get subtly wrong, even today), full pattern matching, and very little in the way of control flow keywords.