I'm going to thoughtfully disagree here. The more I use Rust, the more I feel like we got it wrong all the way back in the mists of ALGOL, and that copy-by-default (which, in (non-immutable) managed languages, translates to multi-ownership-by-default) was a mistake in the same league as null. Being able to convincingly express resource consumption in a first-class way is just too broadly useful, IMO. Certainly we can imagine a "high-level Rust" that doesn't make you care so much about pointers and the stack/heap distinction, but I still think such a language would want to make single-ownership the default. To that end, rather than any of the aforementioned languages, I'll suggest Austral as looking fairly interesting, although it's still far from high-level: https://austral-lang.org/