Hard to answer this question but I worked with scientists who were wasting an incredible amount of time debugging their badly designed fortran or c++ programs,

Hard to answer this question but I worked with scientists who were wasting an incredible amount of time debugging their badly designed fortran or c++ programs, or just hitting walls when they shouldn't. So yes you can easily start hacking something in fortran or c++, and the cognitive load is probably much smaller, but then you have the risk of being eaten by your bugs, or of not working on some problems just because the tool you make is so badly designed you give up doing the necessary changes.