I personally find python to be the sweet spot for me with all of its libraries and syntax.
I use other languages when I need to squeeze every drop of performance from some hardware.
For some performance, check out the Boo language. I got hooked up on it for quite a while. Python syntax + .Net platform and rich meta-programming = lots of fun.
a couple jobs ago, for some reason we used boo, in an otherwise 100% c# .net project, to manage our IoC/Dependency injection configuration layer.