A large part of this is discipline and knowledge. There is nothing to stop you from writing a nice-looking, fast app in C++. I routinely do this kind of thing

A large part of this is discipline and knowledge. There is nothing to stop you from writing a nice-looking, fast app in C++. I routinely do this kind of thing in a mix of C++ and Python because wxPython makes it easier to throw together a UI, but the development overhead for doing it in C++ is relatively small. There are very few algorithms in Matlab or R that you can't find in decent libs for C++, so translating is no big deal given you're going that way anyway. The question is: are we better to put resources into new special-purpose, highly-optimized-for-a-single-type-of-job languages like Julia (which for some reason the article talks about as universal, then admits at the end it is totally special purpose and unsuited for a whole bunch of applications)... or are we better off learning to use the tools we have with greater discipline? I generally opt for the latter. Changing our behaviour as developers will produce better results than building new tools. We have the tools to manage our processes now (CMake, for example, rather than Makefiles). We need to be disciplined about using them. If we aren't, no new tools will help that much.