Erm, it does depend on which part of the scientific community you are talking about - we're not all a monolithic Borgian block you know. There are a bunch of no

Erm, it does depend on which part of the scientific community you are talking about - we're not all a monolithic Borgian block you know. There are a bunch of non-programmers using the Perl Data Language for example (pdl.perl.org). The real problem in my opinion is that perl has no buzz so is not picking as many new users - we can speculate about the reasons, I personally blame how perl6 has gone for a lot of it though.