In my experience, when you're doing technical computing you spend a lot of time exploring your data (or some representative test data set) and doing quick one-off analyses. So an interactive environment with good plotting capabilities etc. is invaluable. See the success of things like Matlab, R, and yes, python (particularly IPython + the rest of the Scipy stack).
Secondly, since a lot of techical computing involves multidimensional arrays, you want good support for them in the language. Which means some kind of array syntax such as Matlab, R, python/numpy, etc., and also that they are efficiently handled behind the scenes (one array instead of nested arrays somewhat popular in C code).
So in the end, there's not a whole lot to choose from if you're not willing to sacrifice any of the two above features. One language I'm excited about, Julia, is a bit special in that it tries to combine the high productivity of such high-level interactive environments with C/Fortran-like high performance. The language itself is really nice, IMHO, but of course the surrounding ecosystem is so far much less mature than that around scientific python.
That being said, I'm also excited about Rust and I hope it will have a bright future, also in technical computing. Though I believe where Rust would be most useful, compared to Julia, say, is for writing low level libraries that can then be used from any language with a C FFI, as Rust doesn't require a big runtime with GC and whatnot.
Secondly, since a lot of techical computing involves multidimensional arrays, you want good support for them in the language. Which means some kind of array syntax such as Matlab, R, python/numpy, etc., and also that they are efficiently handled behind the scenes (one array instead of nested arrays somewhat popular in C code).
So in the end, there's not a whole lot to choose from if you're not willing to sacrifice any of the two above features. One language I'm excited about, Julia, is a bit special in that it tries to combine the high productivity of such high-level interactive environments with C/Fortran-like high performance. The language itself is really nice, IMHO, but of course the surrounding ecosystem is so far much less mature than that around scientific python.
That being said, I'm also excited about Rust and I hope it will have a bright future, also in technical computing. Though I believe where Rust would be most useful, compared to Julia, say, is for writing low level libraries that can then be used from any language with a C FFI, as Rust doesn't require a big runtime with GC and whatnot.