julia is indeed designed to give you the power of R along with much of the ease of python, although it's a bit off from dong that in terms of packages and exten

julia is indeed designed to give you the power of R along with much of the ease of python, although it's a bit off from dong that in terms of packages and extensions. i would suggest that if you know python julia would be easy to pick up. a pure python alternative would be to use the Sage math (http://sagemath.org/ http://sagemath.org/) setup that wraps a lot of the Python math and science packages into a cohesive set of APIs. i use that a lot and enjoy it. i have yet to find a way to do the document generation in LaTeX although i think with some templating it should be easy (e.g. jinja2 or something and emit LaTeX and not HTML). charts are pretty easy using matplotlib for example. and also rpy (http://rpy.sourceforge.net/rpy2.html http://rpy.sourceforge.net/rpy2.html), which binds Python and R.