Have you considered pointing this out to them? Perhaps the people in the project are unaware that this is a solved problem.
That said, I'm encouraged to see so many people interested in it and contributing to it. My perspective, though, is that of a C/Fortran HPC person who is cheering for things that will help people move to a more scalable coding environment. I was looking at Julia to see if it was an alternative to Octave for university users; the impression I got was that it was still too subject to change to recommend at this point.
[edit: and the preview release will include some cute simple SIMD codes i've written, not the optimal ones, but a really nicely written set none the less.]
However, here at Jane Street at least, many of the traders are picking up and using OCaml. If traders can do, so can scientists. And if it works for OCaml, it'll probably work for Haskell. (Which, honestly, is quite a bit nicer overall.)
Also, the general consensus seems to be that Haskell is easier to learn if you don't already have extensive imperative programming experience. So it's also a good fit for scientists in that sense. If all the needed libraries and tools existed--many do and more will, soon--and it was easy to get up and running, Haskell would be a perfect tool. Happily, it's moving in that direction, becoming simpler and more capable.