That's why I actually do a lot of my data science work with Groovy. I just find Python awkward, frustrating and way underpowered as a language (both in terms of language itself but, of course performance as soon as you need to implement anything and not just glue other things together). Groovy + JVM accessible numerical libraries (Smile, ND4J etc) actually make a pretty good combination, even if you do not have access to the state of the art stuff that is going on in R / Python.