I'm contributing toward language integration bindings, hoping to make it convenient and socially acceptable to call out to Perl 5, Python, Ruby, ... so that we will have (a subset of) CPAN, pypy, Rubygems, and so on. You can do this from any language really -- it is just binding to the c lib of the guest language.

It kinda makes me sad that the instinct for most of these things is to port a lib from language to language to language... when does it end?! I never want anyone to write pyplot again -- let's just call pyplot from ALL the languages thanks to the magic that is a little c library called libpython.