>I am involved in scientific programming, and it's getting kind of crazy. This is a domain where programming is purely utilitarian, and what you are programming is more important.

In my experience this leads to a lot of bad programming by people who only care about the utilitarian aspect, not about maintainability, user experience or failure modes.

Scientific programming would benefit the most from a stricter language that catches errors early on. Especially because most of the participants are usually not software engineers that have some semblance of a chance to catch errors in C++. Even they make a lot of mistakes.