"Simple" Languages in FreeBSD

[Martin S. Weber]

Get yourself a "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"
(SICP), it's free and teaches scheme (a lisp). Once you've mastered
that, you may happily delve into several "low-level" schemes,
bells-and-whistles common lisps (e.g., clisp, sbcl), or "modern"
lisps like e.g., clojure/clojurescript.

If you take that route, you'll only have tired smiles for all the
great ideas that these "modern" scripting languages come up with.
If you add a bit of spice with e.g. Doug Hoyte's "Let Over Lambda",
you might enlighten yourself how a high-level language like a lisp
may get you hand-crafted assembler like performance.

Do yourself a favor and stay away from the modern scripting languages
that try to quirkily reimplement half-a-century old lisp (or
smalltalk) ideas.

Do it proper. Go Lisp. Enjoy.