What I'm looking for

Every once in a while I try to write a medium-sized program in Go, and I always come away feeling conflicted. It really is a "much better C" (assuming you want garbage collection). But it's been a decade since I've willingly written much straight C code, and I've been using generic types and exceptions for over 20 years now. And so I doubt that Go was really aimed at me, because it deliberately excludes features that I find natural. In particular, when I try to do "exploratory" programming in Go, I end up ripping up hundreds and hundreds of lines of code every time my strategy changes. Most of this code is error-handling and manually-instantiated versions of what should be generic functions in the standard library.

I'm waiting to see if Rust will fill the niche that I really wanted Go to fill: A fast language which allows me to get close to the machine, but which also offers a pleasant variety of sensible abstractions. On some level, the last such language I used was Dylan, which made some serious mistakes, but which nonetheless tried to deliver both speed and abstractions. Oh, and Scala, but Scala is really just Haskell for people living in the Java ecosystem, except with more dubious magic.

But at this point in my life, I don't check out new programming languages unless (1) they contain non-trivial new ideas, or (2) they're reached sufficient popularity to show up in my new feeds on a regular basis and to provide a huge number of useful libraries. I can't be bothered to deal with languages that merely remix existing ideas tastefully unless they can actually gain some traction.