Julia is a new "high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing." Website here and rationale here. Interview with Stefan Karpinski.
I followed the instructions here to download and build it. The only issue is that I failed to read the platform-specific notes before starting, so I had the wrong (old) gfortran. There are links in the docs, but I followed the notes in this thread and got it from (download link).
[ UPDATE: re the first comment, some discussion here. ]
