If you're doing non-CS academic research and you get only one course/module to teach the new grad students "programming", python it is. That you can get a project going with 3K LoC in a single file is a bonus in academia :)

The scipy/numpy dataframes model is really neat though, python's has all the cool machine learning features, and since they're just a wrapper around some C++ and FORTRAN, it runs fast too if you do things properly.