[isofruit]

Full agreement here. My past experience in the bioinformatics field taught me pretty much that "scientists" at large are just as afraid of the terminal as the average person. The science-folks more specialized on informatics typically are folks focusing on being able to use one language. Not use it well, mind you, just able to produce functional, untested code.

Given that, I highly doubt any of them are even aware of languages beyond python and java and maybe they're aware that C and C++ exists but are scary.

[eggy]

Must be scientists out of school in the past 15 years with the remark about C and C++ being scary, since engineering and science curriculums in the 80s taught Fortran, C, and C++. 'Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Programming', and books like it, were books I turned to do science or engineering. But, I guess you're right, since I learned to program in 1978 on a Commodore PET 2001, computer science and web development have made pushed friendlier languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and so C, C++, and now Rust (I prefer SPARK2014 or Zig), are considered 'scary' for scientists. BLAS (Fortran) and CBLAS (C) are under the hood of all the dressed up Python code up front (Numpy -> CBLAS).

Real Scientists use assembler, C, and Frink! ;)

Sad to say the engineering firm I worked at for 6 years was filled with 20-something and 30-something engineers with only one of 15 of them able to code. Excel use, sure. Coding, no. It wasn't that way 25 years ago.