Nice. I find it pretty easy to get excited about any prospect of a more efficient and typesafe alternative to R and Numpy.
Dex is a functional statically typed language inspired by the ML family. That means type errors will be caught before even compiling the code, which gives a guarantee that once it starts running there will be no case of failure because there is no implementation of a method for given types.
The similarity between the two languages seem to be mostly the high performance powerful native multidimensional array support.