Julia + PyCall + CCall + Gadfly or PyPlot (+ Julia Studio ?) looks delicious. The only feature that absolutely needs to be added is shared memory parallelism
(why wasn’t this an initial core feature of the language?), but I’m extremely excited by the current awesomeness of the Julia ecosystem.
I recommend you get into it now, if you’re a scientific computation person.
Update: Julia has experimental support for shared-memory arrays on Unix, which is really all that I need at this point. Great!