I feel teased by this comment in the fact that you didn't indicate which language (or languages) you moved to that give you those benefits?

Personally I moved from Java to Go, and couldn't be happier with it. Easy to use, easy to understand, similar advantages for debugging, but had some of the same proliferation of files at times.

I've injected a bit of python into my workflow too if I just want to do a quick data-oriented task.