The thinking is to use external tools for the main scientific parts - hence the big focus on shell support.

This is common practice in bioinformatics already, because of the large plethora of tools which would be too much to rewrite for any particular language.

Then, Go will probably be OK for more mundane tasks such as data pre-processing, filtering, etc etc.

Otherwise, there are in fact some scientific Go libraries already, including BioGo [1] and GoChem [2].

[1] https://github.com/biogo/biogo

[2] http://gochem.org