I knew the thread would head in this direction. :) Unfortunately, those languages' syntaxes are only marginally better and they have more complexity than I care for (especially objects and inheritance).
Given your "especially" comment -- you might be mis-remembering something about OCaml? It's true that it has these features, but in practice they are almost never used. The object system is useful if your program's design really needs open recursion / inheritance. But it's far more common to build an OCaml program using other constructs (modules and simple data types).
That's not to say that there isn't any complexity in OCaml. The type system and module/functor system have a daunting number of features. But most applications stick to a much simpler subset of the language, which is quite straightforward and easy to reason about.
