It almost has to be a vector based language given its speed shortcomings, because that's the easiest way to package the canned C routines in manageable chunks t

It almost has to be a vector based language given its speed shortcomings, because that's the easiest way to package the canned C routines in manageable chunks to speed things up. Which C routines are just loops that manipulate scalars, btw. Unfortunately "vector" operations typically cause a lot of temporary intermediate vectors that you never see, which is why a "scalar" language like Julia or C can provide such performance improvements when they handle the whole algorithm without the unnecessary intermediates having to be allocated and filled. I think the vector operations do provide a certain brevity though. Whether this is an advantage or not is very subjective. For myself, I prefer having anonymous functions and operations like "map" for transforming collections (including matrices and vectors) element wise, instead of having all operations that make sense on numbers automatically also operate element wise on vectors and matrices. (Because there are operations on vectors and matrices as a whole, sometimes with the same name as a scalar function, which can lead to confusion - exp being one example and multiplication being another). But I can understand opinions differ in that regard and a lot depends on how "general purpose" the surrounding programming context needs to be.