> Readability counts. In some fields, it counts more than anything. I've worked in about 10 languages now over the last 20 years, and Python is still the easiest to read when you come back to some old code or have to pick up code for a small job, or hand it to a beginner to extend without having them create an unreadable mess. This is what scientists need to do all the time.

Meh. Python might be readable at the smallest scale, but then COBOL is even more readable. What matters is large-scale development, and your implied point that large Python projects turn into unstructured big-ball-of-mud monstrosities is well taken. A big ball of mud is not surveyable, or "readable".

Which is where other modern languages (e.g. Julia in the scientific programming domain, heck even Go or Rust) will probably have an advantage.