I'd like some recommendations for this from the community. As productive as Python but faster execution is the kind of sweet spot I want to explore and learn. Any specific examples or recommendations for such programming languages?
zig and nim for tries to feel like a scripting language while still being fast.
Personally I like clojure for such things.
The type system uses a lattice, which can be a bit unfamiliar, but once you get it under your belt, it's the jam. I highly recommend getting to know it.
Small example of Nim code (from relevant article [2]):
var gc = 0
var total = 0
for line in lines("orthocoronavirinae.fasta"):
if line[0] == '>': # ignore comment lines
continue
for letter in line:
if letter == 'C' or letter == 'G':
gc += 1
total += 1
echo(gc / total)
[0] - https://nim-lang.org
[1] - https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-Python-Programmers
[2] - https://benjamindlee.com/posts/2021/why-i-use-nim-instead-of-python-for-data-processing/Once you've got a repl up and running the JVM launch time isn't an issue and repl driven development lends itself well to data munging/exploration
Clojure's data centricity (functional, everything's a sequence, strong data manipulation std lib) really makes it a dream for these quick and dirty data transformation/exploration jobs
If you want to get fancy, https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk (notebook interface) and https://github.com/techascent/tech.ml.dataset (data frame library) will get you there
Python isn't a particularly good force multiplier purely as a language these days. It was very wise to not go full OOP, so we are spared from the truly horrible, but python is basically C with lists and new syntax as most people use it.
It is significantly faster than Python but has a similar vibe.
That being said, performance isn't really an aspect of the language but of the compiler and runtime. PyPy for example, has a Jit compiler.