I've been looking at Factorie for a while but haven't actually done anything heavy with it.
I planned to replace the optimizer in CMU's POS tagger with the one implemented in OpenNLP to make the tagger fully Apache. Unfortunately, so busy right now. Currently, I'm running the tagger on AWS, so the GPL doesn't hurt me much.
BTW, besides the POS tagger, CMU's TweeboParser depends on Turbo Parser which again is licensed under GPL.
If you prefer C, you can try SENNA: http://ml.nec-labs.com/senna/. It includes POS tagging, chunking, NER, constituency parsing and semantic role labeling. But dependency parsing is not there yet.
It's super fast (thanks to C) and very accurate (thanks to Deep Learning approach). The license is not for commercial usage though.
Besides Julia, I think another alternate language to Python for scientific computation would be Scala. Breeze (from ScalaNLP project) is an effort to bring Numpy and Matlab syntax to Scala: https://github.com/scalanlp/breeze/wiki/Breeze-Linear-Algebr...