If you look at julia, it's done some amazing work at being a very high level flexible language thats also crazy fast. On the side of neural networks, theres some really exciting stuff in flux.jl: https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl

whhich provides a beautiful high level interface to a fast neural network written in pure julia. Here's an example of how simple it as at the core: http://fluxml.ai/Flux.jl/stable/models/basics.html

When I was in academia (physics) I basically lived and breathed Fortran. I find tensorflow in python quite nice to work with and undeserving of your derogatory comment.

What you call being a script kiddie I call working at a higher level of abstraction.

H...hey. :(