[lokimedes]

I can only provide anecdotal material, but back in 2007-2014 when I was a particle physics researcher, we saw a high uptake of python for steering data analysis jobs. The actual calculations were done in C++. Gradually over the years, as more students joined the LHC conquest, our tools evolved to allow more of the analyses to be directly programmed in Python. R was never a thing among the 10000+ physicists in our community. These people have since then drifted around the world working on Big Data, ML and recently Data Science. It’s hard to keep count, but I routinely recognize fellow particle physicists at various ML companies.

For the curious, our primary hammer was “ROOT” https://root.cern - note its well-evolved ability to connect Python and C++ code.