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.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.