In high energy physics we've recently completed a big transition from FORTRAN77 to C++. PAW and CERNLIB were standard in the 90's but now most major experiments

In high energy physics we've recently completed a big transition from FORTRAN77 to C++. PAW and CERNLIB were standard in the 90's but now most major experiments use ROOT. You can use ROOT with Python but most people don't bother. Programming comes pretty naturally to most physicists and learning the details of the ROOT libraries and experiment specific libraries takes much more time than picking up C++. I've seen most grad students get comfortable with the basics of C++ in a couple of days while they typically struggle with the usage of the libraries for a number of months. The documentation is autogenerated from the code so in many cases you need to read through the library code to figure out how things work. In these situations it's very helpful to be as comfortable as possible in C++. The benefit of using Python instead of C++ would be fairly minimal in my opinion because so much of analysis work depends on understanding these libraries that are written in a lower level language out of necessity. What occurred to me while reading this article though is that we should perhaps be using Python for our scripting needs. We have a number of scripts that we use regularly for querying databases and submitting jobs and most of them are written in Perl. I think that Python would be much easier to read and hack; especially because most of the physicists don't know Perl.