Odin is quite a fun new language I just started learning. It is meant as a C replacement and comes with a decent standard library and third party library so there is a lot already built that you can use. It also is fully compatible with C and can use C libraries.

Just be warned that documentation is lacking and you will have to read the source code of the standard library from time to time or seek help from their discord.

I self host a searxng instance and I find the combination of bing, duckduckgo and qwant as the source engines to return decent results. You can use a public instance and choose those engines in settings.

I discovered Father Christmas by The Kinks this year and I got to say that it has become my favorite Christmas song.