I&#x27;d suggest Racket, a descendant of Scheme.<p>- It is really easy to download, install, and be coding in 5 minutes.<p>- There&#x27;s a nice GUI IDE, if that&#x27;s your cup of tea. (Also I maintain racket-mode for Emacs.)<p>- It is &quot;batteries included&quot; (maybe not compared to Python (!), but definitely compared to most Schemes).<p>- You can write everything from command-line programs that launch quickly, to GUI apps, to web apps.<p>And particularly why I mention it here:<p>- You can explore many approaches mentioned in the OP: functional, gradual typing, object-oriented, lazy evaluation, datalog, and more. (Ultimately, Racket is &quot;a programming-language programming language&quot;. Although you can ignore that level of abstraction and simply use it as a very nice lisp.)