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I'll be the counter example. PhD in life sciences, but I've also been programming since I was a teen. Rust is by far my most used language for both general fun projects and in my role as a programmer in the life-sciences. Python is OK for ad-hoc analyses, but I cannot stand to use dynamically typed languages for anything "real" given how much difficulty dynamic typing imposes on reading and understanding code.

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Sure, but by your description, you aren't really the people I'm describing. If you've been doing this since you were a teen, you're a "Real Programmer". My point was that people who have to do this as item 7 of 10 things in their job description are very much less likely to learn something like Rust than Python. That is undeniably a bigger lift to a non-programmer. Python's success in the sciences is in large part due to how good a fit as a language it is for part-time occasional programmers.

I like all kinds of languages, but the only ones I would encourage my partner to bother with as tools for her science work would be R and Python.

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