Despite its failure to meet one of your big criteria (static* typing), I'm going to make a case for Python. Here are a few reasons I think you should take a look at it:
- For an imperative language, it is surprisingly functional. This was one of the things that struck me when I learned it. Take list comprehensions, for example. It has lambdas, first-class functions, and many functionally-inspired compositions on iterators (maps, folds, zips...). It gives you the option of picking whatever paradigm suits the problem best.
- IMHO, it is, like Haskell, beautiful to code in. The syntax is simple and elegant.
- It has a culture that focuses on doing things in a straightforward way, rather than focusing too minutely on efficiency.
I understand if you are looking for something else though. Logic programming, for instance, might be right up your alley, as others have suggested.
* I assume you mean static typing here, since you want to declare the types. Techincally, Python is a strongly typed language, since you can't arbitrarily interpret, say, a string as an number. Interestingly, there are Python derivatives that allow static typing, like Boo.
