> It became popular because it was easy to learn, and a lot nicer to use than the other big scripting language ... I would routinely find non-engineers and non-

> It became popular because it was easy to learn, and a lot nicer to use than the other big scripting language ... I would routinely find non-engineers and non-programmers using it for their work, as well as writing libraries for their peers. ... many of them learned to program while in grad school. Sure, and this is my argument. It is easy to start out with, which makes it appealing to academics without a CS background. But is this a good thing? Because then these academics without a CS background write monstrous, poorly optimized scripts compounded by a slow language, then use drastically more compute to run their science, and then at the end publish their paper and the scripts they used are very hard to adapt to further research because very rarely are they structured as modules. Just because it is easy to write doesn't mean it is the most appropriate for science. It is not commonly acceptable to publish papers without a standardized format and other conventions. Students put in work to learn how to do it properly. The same should be true for code.