[Barrin92]

tbf you don't need to go to C. You could write Common Lisp or Ocaml, both academic high level languages and very performant. Hell SBCL can get you to C range performance wise while you're writing dynamic, GCed code. Sure it's a little bit more involved than learning Python but not that much if you get 50x performance for free. Prevalence of Python is really baffling to me because compute resources cost money.

[el_oni]

academic for CS maybe. Not so much for chemistry, biology etc. If you work in computation areas of those subjects you are more likely to know matlab, R, python and maybe Julia.

I didn't know of anybody who had done any Lisp or Ocaml in my time in academia (in chemistry, chemical engineering and biology departments), but that's just 3 universities, and i certainly didn't know everybody.

[Yoric]

I've known people who write OCaml for biology, but they sure looked lonely :)