As an aside, these sorts of comments about the needs of a "scientific programmer" always irk me.
I've been doing scientific software development now for 20 years. I do non-numerical scientific computing, originally structural biology, then bioinformatics, and now chemical informatics, the last dominated by graph theory.
I rarely use NumPy and effectively never the languages you mentioned. Last year on one project I did use a hypergeometric survival function from SciPy, then re-implemented it in Python so I wouldn't have the large dependency for what was a few tens of lines of code.
Biopython, as another example, has almost no dependencies on NumPy, and works under PyPy.
I've been doing scientific software development now for 20 years. I do non-numerical scientific computing, originally structural biology, then bioinformatics, and now chemical informatics, the last dominated by graph theory.
I rarely use NumPy and effectively never the languages you mentioned. Last year on one project I did use a hypergeometric survival function from SciPy, then re-implemented it in Python so I wouldn't have the large dependency for what was a few tens of lines of code.
Biopython, as another example, has almost no dependencies on NumPy, and works under PyPy.