The combo of C(++) and Python is very strong. A friend of mine works in a research HPC lab (think around 16000 cores); they use Python for the IO and interface

The combo of C(++) and Python is very strong. A friend of mine works in a research HPC lab (think around 16000 cores); they use Python for the IO and interface glue and C for the heavily parallel science code. It's the best of both worlds.