I disagree since it's suppose to be a scientific language. IMO it should aim to be a DSL to that effect; ergonomic for the purpose of analysing and calculating. Kind of like a declarative language; the hard stuff should be left to the compiler where it's possible. Again, I think Clojure does a good job at this.
"Kind of like a declarative language; the hard stuff should be left to the compiler where it's possible. "
That's the holy grail of numerics. I don't think that's feasible if they want to cater to researchers who need to hand tune their algorithms.
We are quite far off from "do what I mean" semantics. Clojure's approach works for a grammar of very limited set of very well understood container operations.
If you want symbolic computations use e.g. Mathematica, Macsyma, etc.
