[eggy]

Must be scientists out of school in the past 15 years with the remark about C and C++ being scary, since engineering and science curriculums in the 80s taught Fortran, C, and C++. 'Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Programming', and books like it, were books I turned to do science or engineering. But, I guess you're right, since I learned to program in 1978 on a Commodore PET 2001, computer science and web development have made pushed friendlier languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and so C, C++, and now Rust (I prefer SPARK2014 or Zig), are considered 'scary' for scientists. BLAS (Fortran) and CBLAS (C) are under the hood of all the dressed up Python code up front (Numpy -> CBLAS).

Real Scientists use assembler, C, and Frink! ;)

Sad to say the engineering firm I worked at for 6 years was filled with 20-something and 30-something engineers with only one of 15 of them able to code. Excel use, sure. Coding, no. It wasn't that way 25 years ago.