SciRuby
I hope they don't set up SciPy as the project to emulate and improve upon. Deep knowledge of R, Fortran, and Matlab would better inform this project of what scientists need.<p>SciPy is great, but it's clearly best for programmers that have a slight scientific bent and can't stomach learning the existing scientific tools (which are admittedly a bit difficult to combine with modern software engineering). There are some great ideas in SciPy, but a broader set of influences is essential to making a great scientific toolkit.