Deeplearning4j and ND4J contributor here: We've created a distributed framework for scientific computing on the JVM, ND4J, which is the linalg library behind Deeplearning4j, which includes ConvNets and other deep-learning algorithms. Contrary to the author, we believe Scala is the future of scientific computing. While Python is a wonderful language, the optimization and maintenance of scalable programs often happens in C++, which not a lot of people enjoy.