[lambdatronics]

Great rundown! It's love/hate for me too. Python is the worst language for scientific computing, except for all the others. I think Julia's going to take the crown in a few years though, once the libraries broaden out and they figure out how to cache precompiled binaries, to get the boot time down. With Python, it's not so much that you get to write C, you have to write C to get performance. I'll be interested to see whether Julia takes off for applications beside heavy numerical stuff. That seems to be the Achille's heel of languages designed for math/science applications -- it's easier to write scientific packages inside a general-purpose language than vice versa.