From a professional perspective, I've been dabbling in Objective-C/Cocoa and the Android SDK (trying to dredge up old Java knowledge) - but for something 'new' I think I'd take a closer look at Ruby on Rails.
I'd like to see strong contenders for web frameworks in the language, but I think the game is still quite early. There are a few options, but they all seem to be quite immature at this time.
it's a systems programming language, you supposedly can do anything. there's some companies already using it like soundcloud. it's awesome for api's because of it's speed.
also, it's a well thought language with many different decisions from common languages, it does not have exceptions and so on. it's an awesome language if you want to expand your mind.
otherwise, i would pick clojure.