You really should give Julia a go. It's as or more expressive in the general purpose sense of things as Python. It's the best of MATLAB and Python in one neat package.
Edit: Plus, you can pass your data structures out to Python or C for processing. And you can use a whole host of visualization tools.
I just dont see people with "software engineering" background taking any serious liking to it. So it creates DIVIDE between the "software engineering folks" (that want regular-looking-OOP-and-basic-FP architecting feature for APIs and stuff) and "data science folks" who just want to focus on the algorithms.
The litmus test for a "truly general purpose language" to me would be:
(1) write some algorithmic code in it (with not much concurrency and parallelism)
(2) write some (purposefully heavily overengineered) GUI or web-app (full-stack) code in it in a team of 3+ including at least one guy who's both really junior and another guy who's really sloppy
(3) write something making heavy use of networking, concurrency and parallelism
If all three feel EQUALLY natural in a language, than you've got a truly general purpose language. If not, look for something else.
And I know, people hate general purpose solutions just as much as they hate "expert generalist" people, and they have good reasons too, as we've all (or most) been burnt bad by contact with both such "solutions" and with such self-labeled people in the past. But just because we generally suck at "general purpose" doesn't mean we should stop trying!
> Python succeeded because it was general-purpose enough.
> I just dont see people with "software engineering" background taking any serious liking to it.
I guess my point is that if you found Python general purpose enough, you'd likely find Julia general purpose enough too. If people with "software engineering background" take a serious liking to Python but not to Julia, then the reason probably isn't the language itself, but a combination of lack of popularity and a pre-conceived notion that the language is meant to be "scientific" not "general-purpose", that there aren't enough libraries, that the language might not survive, etc.
Expressiveness of the language is one thing. Does it have the vast numbers of quality and well tried and tested libraries that Python does? That's generally more important than expressiveness.
Edit: Plus, you can pass your data structures out to Python or C for processing. And you can use a whole host of visualization tools.