> 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 u

> 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. For many of them, the alternative is that they simply wouldn't have done the science, and would have focused on research that didn't need computation. Or they'd use some expensive, proprietary tool. Prior to Python becoming popular among them (circa 2005-2007), plenty of good, fast, whatever-metric-you-want languages existed. These academics were not using them. Python is really what enabled the work to be done.