The astronomy department I worked at briefly during my undergrad underwent a similar process. The ten or so grad students separately used Matlab, Mathematica, C

The astronomy department I worked at briefly during my undergrad underwent a similar process. The ten or so grad students separately used Matlab, Mathematica, C, IDL, and a couple of the newer members used Python. They spent some time on the side working on the AstroPy package and all started transitioning to Python as their needed functions and data processing pipelines were implemented. I'm in nuclear engineering now, I'm seeing a similar process. It used to be Matlab for everything but once the Anaconda Python distro came out and made installing python and the science libraries a simple process many undergrads are now using Python instead. The Spyder editor with the documentation window makes it really easy for undergrads to lookup functions, similar to the Matlab editor.