unfortunately this is true. For one thing Go doesn't have a REPL - major problem for data science/AI/scientic programming. And it's very committed to old-style procedural/imperative paradigm.
Numpy is carrying Python, and its competitors are thin. There's Julia, but that's not really ambitious enough compared with Numpy to be worth moving to. There's Scala though then you need to love the JVM. Lua had promise as a nice and tight, pragmatic and fast language, but it seems to have missed its window of opportunity. What else? I'd genuinely like to know. Ideally I'd like something that's got a functional programming flavour but that also data-parallel, almost R-style, by default, so as easily able to target the GPU. I took a look at futhark but it seems too experimental, as does Ocaml/spoc combo. I am taking a serious look at the probabilistic programming area with Edward or Stan, but then we're back to Python front ends.... Actually I did look at Swift which does c-class speed with an official REPL but an apple-supported language may not attract the science/ML crowd. Meantime rust is REPL-less for now...
Numpy is carrying Python, and its competitors are thin. There's Julia, but that's not really ambitious enough compared with Numpy to be worth moving to. There's Scala though then you need to love the JVM. Lua had promise as a nice and tight, pragmatic and fast language, but it seems to have missed its window of opportunity. What else? I'd genuinely like to know. Ideally I'd like something that's got a functional programming flavour but that also data-parallel, almost R-style, by default, so as easily able to target the GPU. I took a look at futhark but it seems too experimental, as does Ocaml/spoc combo. I am taking a serious look at the probabilistic programming area with Edward or Stan, but then we're back to Python front ends.... Actually I did look at Swift which does c-class speed with an official REPL but an apple-supported language may not attract the science/ML crowd. Meantime rust is REPL-less for now...