My scientific computing journey was

- Matlab in the first few science lab courses + first CS course.

- C++ in second CS course

- Fortran for the scientific computing course

I found Fortran worse than matlab. The error messages were difficult to parse, and it was much more difficult to do step through debugging like in matlab.

But later I learned Python, and now use it professionally to do scientific computing, and I would give anything to go back to Fortran. Or use Rust or Julia. Or if Wolfram/Mathematica if that was possible. Anything but Python.

The fundamental problem with Python is that all the math is hacked into it, unlike Julia/Matlab/Mathematica where the math takes first priority and other values are secondary.