I like Ocaml for these reasons. It's actually a very simple language and has the C-like elegance. If you already know a few programming languages and can "think functionally", you can pick it up in about a week.

C's major win, in its time, was context-independence: people could drop into a 200,000-line C project and have a good idea of what the code they're looking at is doing. And if C code has been written well, it's not hard to look further if needed. This is not really possible when metaprogramming features like self-modifying code and insane macros are pulled out. Lisp is great in the right hands, but I've seen undisciplined "rock star" programmers produce write-only code in it and that's ugly.

Ocaml also has this context-independence, but it has most of the power of a language like Lisp, it's statically typed and functional, but it's pretty much the minimally complex language that has that power. It loses on libraries, but as far as the language itself goes, it's one of the best languages out there.