[thanatropism]

This is unintuitive, but modern fortran is a shorter jump from Matlab than Python.

The greatness and wretchedness of Python is "pythonicity". It's very hard to miss the mark with Python (all things considered: life is finite, most people are more like analysts than developers, analysts deliver generally more value per hour than developers, Rust is hard to learn) but you basically need to submit to the "Pythonic" brainwashing -- which includes "anything performance-critical should be written in $fast_lang and then used from Python; but almost nothing is perf critical, and most of what's conceivably needed already exists".