I don't know why you have C up on some pedestal. Its not really a 'hard' language to learn or grasp. Sure some languages take less time to learn than others. B

I don't know why you have C up on some pedestal. Its not really a 'hard' language to learn or grasp. Sure some languages take less time to learn than others. But every single language makes tradeoffs. For e.g performance vs productivity/usability OR static typing vs dynamic typing is a common theme when discussing C vs {Java, Python, blah}. Also, your comments falsely compare the difficulty of the TASK with the difficulty of the IMPLEMENTATION/LANGUAGE. They are not the same! Take any advanced applied math algorithm and implement it in Python. Its not 'easy' by any means. The domains you mentioned have a higher barrier to entry because the tasks themselves are difficult. The languages and technology used are simply variables in a much larger optmization problem that also includes monetary/human/computing/time resources as variables.