[samdk]

I think you may be under-weighting the value of Python being a great exploratory tool a bit.

For the (relatively small) amount of research I've done, the bulk of the time spent working with code was spent exploring large-ish sets of data to see what results came up. Python is a very nice language for doing this, and also has a great ecosystem of tools and libraries for doing it.

I think it's also true that the benefits of FP and static typing are most pronounced on large codebases. If you're writing small specific bits of code you can mostly hold in your head all at once you don't gain nearly as much from a language like Haskell.

Which is not to say I wouldn't like to see more people using languages like Haskell (my primary programming language is OCaml now), but I think the bad habits people in scientific fields have around programming are a lot more of a detriment than the specific language they're using.