OCaml

Everythin I read about OCaml points to it being a great language.

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Software/Ocaml/why_ocaml.html
http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg00310.html

It is insanely fast. Shy of C, but fater than C++. Has tons of other cool features.
I highly suggest looking into OCaml. One drawback is its library support is weaker than Lisp's.

Now, I am excited I want to do some kind of a project in OCaml :D
Maybe code some kind of a graph algorithm or something. I hope it plays nicely with other languages especially python.