I think one of the reasons its still frequently used in some parts of academia is a Grad student can figure it out in a few day of self-study and move on to doi

I think one of the reasons its still frequently used in some parts of academia is a Grad student can figure it out in a few day of self-study and move on to doing their actual research from there. As opposed to if you want them to work with a large C++ program, getting them familiar enough with the language to be useful can take half a semester.