The article you link would is about biology, not only that but Wikipedia has to try to be consistent across various fields, unlike mathematics and physics where the natural logarithm is used almost exclusively, so it makes sense to use a more explicit notation.

Sure physics (and sometimes mathematics) do use the notation 'ln' every so often (if only because it's shorter) but you'd be hard pressed to find a reference in anything related to mathematics or physics that uses log as the base 10 logarithm.

Clearly the easiest way to avoid the ambiguity is to only ever use the natural logarithm, which is the choice made by all the programming languages you listed at the end. And since you don't list any references where log should refer to the base-10 logarithm I'll have to conclude that they made the right choice.