Yes, there are lots of languages -- for example Go, Clojure, and even C++11 -- that are better languages in their own right and have also solved the concurrency

Yes, there are lots of languages -- for example Go, Clojure, and even C++11 -- that are better languages in their own right and have also solved the concurrency problem well enough. Unfortunately, scientific programming is highly dependent on libraries. So, in my field (bioinformatics), I'm basically constrained to Python or R. Python is the less shitty of the two. You can see how thrilled I am about this situation.