Agree with the above. In addition, all of these higher level languages popular in science seem to have pretty good support for calling existing C/Fortran libs

Agree with the above. In addition, all of these higher level languages popular in science seem to have pretty good support for calling existing C/Fortran libs when necessary. Julia is no exception, which makes it possible to take advantage of all the work that's been done developing optimized numerical codes. That said, I would like to see something more automatic. In my limited experience, Julia's ccall works as advertised, but f2py in Python is much simpler to use.