Yep, my school recently started teaching Python as the intro programming language -- for the bioinformatics program, at least. C, C++ and Fortran have similar

Yep, my school recently started teaching Python as the intro programming language -- for the bioinformatics program, at least. C, C++ and Fortran have similar enough characteristics and capabilities for scientific work that once a researcher has learned one, there's not much benefit to learning either of the others. But scripting/glue languages make it possible to hack together something in an afternoon that's impressive enough to get another scientist's attention and perhaps consider that languages do matter. I think Python will convince new scientists that C++ and Fortran deserve to be replaced, and another fast, easy-to-parallelize language will be the actual replacement.