If you are doing scientific computing, have you considered Fortran? The gfortran (GCC Fortran) compiler supports Fortran 2003, which has object-oriented features, and since Fortran 90 the language has had array operations and syntax similar to Matlab or Python with numpy.
I'm not a big fan of Fortran for my particular domain, which includes lots of strings (biological sequences). Here Fortran is not as quick. See for example the k-nucleotide benchmark:
