I see this as a real issue. R is useful but sorta crappy as languages go. I have hopes for Incanter [http://incanter.org/] (a clojure-based stats environment), but it looks stalled out vs dead in the water. Even still, for basic stats it's pretty viable.
I would love to see a stats environment based on a sane, full-featured language that was ready to take advantage of multiple cores and GPU computing. Clojure has all the building blocks, but it's not built yet.
I had been planning to work on Incanter over the summer as part of Google Summer of Code, but things didn't pan out. The organization promoting the project wasn't accepted as a mentoring organization.
I would love to see a stats environment based on a sane, full-featured language that was ready to take advantage of multiple cores and GPU computing. Clojure has all the building blocks, but it's not built yet.