Give me a language

I justed needed a language to code in..

Now that I'm divorced, I suddenly found meself with plenty of time to spare, even despite the day job. It was a relief, and I inclined back towards my binary sweetheart.

What I had in mind was to develop simple web based applications. Nothing in particular, I just wanted to experiment, for I hadn't coded anything for quite some time. So I began searching around, trying to pick up a language that would be both interesting to play with, and also somewhat efficient.

I'm not an actual hacker, but netiher I am a newbie. So before you begin yelling out and promoting your-language-of-choice, please take a look at my needs:

My experience: I first began programming on a Casio calculator, which had a BASIC implementation. Then I moved to GW BASIC on the pc. Then came Pascal and Fortran, during high school courses. I always avoided C. In college I drifted away from programming, and toyed with HTML. For a while I played with Assembly, but got bored too quickly, as it was too limited in terms of portability. Then I adopted Python, it was 1.4 I think, and it was a nice experience. Then I quit. I kind of lost interest, and also didn't have much time to spend (yeah, marriage).

Given that, here's a more recent me: I believe that server farms will soon replace desktop pcs. Not every pc, of couse, but I believe the majority of people who use their boxes just to surf the internet will soon have a more viable (and cheaper) solution, similar to the $100 laptop. Or even mobile devices, or gaming consoles. Anyway, my rationale was that web based applications were the way to go. So that's what I sought, a language to build the 2.0 experience on.

Rails, right. That's where I started, buzz and all. But I wanted to first study Ruby itself, so I read the talking foxes and the pragmatic tutorial. Actually, I didn't finish either of them. Ruby looked better (and more fun) than Python (as I knew it), but I had a hunch that I was looking at the wrong place.

So I searched more, and came up with Paul Graham. Is there anyone out there who read his essays and not tried out Lisp? I was amazed, and spent several days with the HyperSpec and On Lisp.

Lovable as Lisp was, I was dubious again. My favorite hosting company didn't support Lisp (what a surprise). It had extensions for Ruby, Rails, and Python, and PHP of course. I tried to find a decent (and not expensive) host that did provide Lisp support (or at least shell accounts) but I grew tired before I succeeded.

I took on Python, over again. It still made sense, everything in its right place, batteries included. Except that there were too many batteries now. Django, web.py, TurboGears, Zope.. I was, well, lost. Did I need all this stuff?

I reverted back towards the Ruby side. I actually tried out Rails this time. And ended up with a bunch of subdirectories. Many of them had even scripts in them. What does dispatch do, again? Not sure I needed all these scripts, and certainly not I wanted (a bunch of files popping up by themselves).

I gave up toying around, and took on PHP 5. I had always avoided PHP, like I did C. Why? Because they're both ugly. I thought (wanted to believe) that coding is about elegance, but probably I was a fool. So here I was, trying to implement a simple app in PHP. Guess what? I got bored..

I realized what I wanted was a small but extensible language, which I could shape myself, according to my own taste. Google led me to Scheme. Lisp again? Well, I loved the intro.. The whole language came with a standard (of 50 pages) that was about the length of the index of Common Lisp. I searched for a common implementation, but to my surprise, most of them had non-portable features that tried to imitiate Common Lisp itself.

Back to square one.

There you go, my quest in the past couple of weeks, with my basic background.

What I want, is a language, that is both interesting and not too-out-of-the-mainstream (so that I can find a plausible host).

My main focus is developing amateur web based applications in my spare time. I'm not a web startup, nor incorporated, so I wouldn't be looking into dedicated servers for hosting (still too expensive, as a hobby at least).

Any ideas?