Useful languages on UNIX that are not C - was Re: C trivia - was Re: Dennis Ritchie has died

My inability to identify a good general purpose UNIX programming language that is compiled to native code and has good library support :-) I'd like to be able to write apps with a GUI and be able to issue SQL, just general purpose stuff. On IBM I prefer assembler. PL/I is a good (excellent) general purpose language. Ada 95 is also a good general purpose langauge, but stiffer than PL/I and can be annoying especially when working with strings. I'm not aware of any PL/I for UNIX or Linux, and Ada while available and very good, lacks SQL and GUI support or quickly runs into GPL contamination issues just from linking libraries which is not something I'm going to get into. The ncurses interface for Ada is excellent btw but ncurses has limitations. The examples you listed aren't general purpose programming languages by any stretch and Scheme and CL are normally byte code compiled although if you look hard enough you can find a native code version here or there, but they all have various quirks. Any language that forces you into a paradigm like "everything is tail recursion" or "every solution is a functional program" is (far) too narrow for general use. I could abuse FORTRAN as it has been for most of its life and force it outside the box, but I don't want to do that. C is a good model of the generic approach in that you can write procedural code or write OO code, basically it lets you do what you want rather than forcing a paradigm on you. In that sense, to me it is good. But it's too low level for my taste and there are other things I don't like about it. PL/I would be about perfect if it existed except for the fact all the UNIX header files are in C. To me that is a problem I don't know how to get around in all languages other than C/C++. GUI and SQL would be on top of the list. Not sure what else I would want since I don't write code on UNIX yet. Hoping to though. I used to make a point to choose an appropriate (domain specific) language for whatever task I had to solve. I wound up being good enough with many languages and not an expert at any of them back then. There has been so much language development over the years, I'm hoping there is some magic bullet language (for me) that's general enough and high level enough to be easily usable but with interfaces to anything a normal application could want. Maybe that's not a reasonable goal on UNIX, I don't know enough to say. I do know on IBM all of the application programming languages offer more or less the same support for various items like database, UI etc. and I am used to that model. There are a lot less choices over there so we aren't as fussy. UNIX has so many choices, it makes it a little harder kind of like at a restaurant that serves only one thing (pizza, chicken wings) you don't have much deciding to do but if you go to a place with a phone book for a menu all of a sudden life is complicated. I know there is a lot of UNIX knowledge on this list and wanted to bat the idea around a little and hear what people are using for their main GOTO language (no pun intended!) and why.