[dalke]

"Since when is it reasonable to judge a language on how the amateurs use it, instead of the professionals?"

In a field like mine (computational chemistry) where most of the programmers are expert chemists but amateur programmers, then it's very reasonable to judge a language choice based on the expected user base.

I expect the same holds for most other computational-based sciences, where it may take 4 years to have the domain knowledge to start programming, even though the programming itself does not require deep knowledge of the language or of computer science and can be picked up in a few months of self-study.