What bothers you about Java? Or rather, what would make a language "better" than Java for your tastes?

Less typing would be nice. I am willing to hope that dynamic typing will make for more fun languages, although I am very used to code completion by now (which is inherently impossible with dynamic typing, I think). Sometimes I wonder if the dynamic typing advocates are just the genius people, the same ones who can also remember the syntax of UNIX shell commands by heart.

If the dynamic languages fail me, I guess Scala might be worth a look.

I think outside of Java, and C#, there is a fair amount of IDE hate. So you tend to not see IDEs in that rich sense you are thinking about (the exception is smalltalk, which is an IDE and VM all rolled into one ball). Some would say language like haskell are so brief, there is nothing an IDE could possible do to help it.

did you try O'caml and Haskell stuff ?

Not yet. How does Haskell compare to Scheme, I wonder? I have tried Erlang.

I have read the beginnings of Haskell tutorials now, and it seems to be very similar to Erlang? I am not sure I like the static typing, though (ie inflexible arrays). So maybe not enough reason to prefer Haskell over Erlang?

The base looks similar (space is function call, static types inference, currying, '->' for function definition etc.) because the common ancestor for haskell, o'caml, erlang and various others is ML, another language.

This is the same kind of relation between C, java and C#, the basic type system and grammar are cousin.

I won't answer to the "static typing is inflexible", but you should check the type system itself, and its genericity system and modularity system.