This is very reductive of scientific computing. Maybe that conference is particularly narrowly focused on certain applications but there's plenty of people deve

This is very reductive of scientific computing. Maybe that conference is particularly narrowly focused on certain applications but there's plenty of people developing "real" programs (not python scripts) in academia/research labs, and you usually see those in conferences. Look for instance at multi-purpose solvers like FreeFEM or FEniCS, or the distributed parallelism linalg libraries like PETSc or MUMPS, or more recent projects like OCCA. These are not small projects, and they care a lot about scalability and maintainability, as well as some of them being pretty "CS-y".