For JVM, there is Incanter which is a statistics library written in Clojure. It is backed by Parallel Colt for the heavy number lifting. Note that I'm not trying to say that Clojure would be a scientist-friendly language :)
A lot of people blame Lisp for too many brackets, but I generally feel they are not the issue after reading Lisp for a while. What may make it scientist-unfriendly is to write math formulas in infix grammar.
How does Incanter work on HPC? R is pretty awful from that point of view, and if there ever will be room for a specialised statistical language it's got to be able to do massive number crunching.
I've heard bad things of JVM for tightly coupled jobs on HPC (though I know there's been some improvement: e.g. a lot of work done by EPCC in Edinburgh). Does Clojure manages to offer a good parallel implementation on top of the JVM or has no work been done in this area?
According to the website, Parallel Colt supports multicore machines. There's no mention of MPI though. As far as I know, Incanter only wraps it, so it does not influence the performance that much..
