Don't listen to my opinions, sure. But pay heed to the large number of computational chemists who do use these languages. There is a reason that professionals employ the tools that they do.
The same would not be true if we were supposed to teach them C++ for example. It's a huge, sprawling language, full of difficult concepts that are unfriendly to teach, and equally filled with foot guns that if you don't teach them will definitely maim your students, but if you do teach them take up yet more precious time on minutiae.
Safe Rust wouldn't be as hard to teach as C++ but it's no picnic. So even if the Chemists decided that ideally they'd like their undergraduates to learn Rust instead of Python, I think the argument would be that it can't be done on the existing timeline.
Compared to Perl, sure, Python is teachable. But I'm willing to speculate that Safe Rust as a semi-pure functional language (basically: when in doubt, .clone() all the things and don't even think about the minor hit to performance) can also be taught as a first-time programming language. Rust may be at a disadvantage to Python wrt. bindings to the existing ecosystem of C/C++/F0RTRAN scientific codes, but that's a temporary state of things.
> but then they're going to hit the large legacy of existing code and wonder why you taught them something that not related to what they're going to use.
OTOH other languages should be easier to learn by reference to a comparatively elegant language like Rust. Python, Fortran, C++ etc. have almost nothing in common but Rust could arguably be a good introductory baseline that shares features with all of these.
That is a very good question.
IIRC at the time Perl had a bad reputation because of the weird syntax "$%@" (not weird to shell programmers, so much, but they were weird...)
Python was "object orientated" and from a computer scientist.
Perl is very imperative and informal. Python felt to people like a real language, Perl did not.
I am reaching for reasons as I was very disappointed that Python was the winner. I have never liked Python (personal taste - meaningful white space? Really?) and knew Perl very well.
(Perl Vs. PHP is a different, much more interesting, and tragic story)