Don't listen to my opinions, sure. But pay heed to the large number of computational chemists who do use these languages. There is a reason that professionals employ the tools that they do.

One reason we have lots of people in numerate disciplines using Python is that we taught them Python. Python is very teachable. Given a class of average 19 year old students from a numerate discipline, my colleagues will teach most of them Python to a reasonable standard in a single module (so e.g 2 hours of teaching per week over 16 weeks).

The same would not be true if we were supposed to teach them C++ for example. It's a huge, sprawling language, full of difficult concepts that are unfriendly to teach, and equally filled with foot guns that if you don't teach them will definitely maim your students, but if you do teach them take up yet more precious time on minutiae.

Safe Rust wouldn't be as hard to teach as C++ but it's no picnic. So even if the Chemists decided that ideally they'd like their undergraduates to learn Rust instead of Python, I think the argument would be that it can't be done on the existing timeline.

zozbot234

> Python is very teachable. Given a class of average 19 year old students from a numerate discipline, my colleagues will teach most of them Python to a reasonable standard in a single module

Compared to Perl, sure, Python is teachable. But I'm willing to speculate that Safe Rust as a semi-pure functional language (basically: when in doubt, .clone() all the things and don't even think about the minor hit to performance) can also be taught as a first-time programming language. Rust may be at a disadvantage to Python wrt. bindings to the existing ecosystem of C/C++/F0RTRAN scientific codes, but that's a temporary state of things.

aragilar

To science majors? No. It lacks so many of the things you'd need to get them started (e.g. a REPL/notebook server, interactive plotting, a "here's everything you need" install (a.k.a conda)), and most (but not all) students have no real interest in learning to program. You could get the interested-in-programming ones to learn Rust, but then they're going to hit the large legacy of existing code and wonder why you taught them something that not related to what they're going to use.

zozbot234

There's an interesting experimental project for a Rust REPL and notebook interface at https://github.com/google/evcxr . Other things, e.g. semi-officially endorsed collections of community crates with no strong backward compatibility guarantees, have seen some development already.

> but then they're going to hit the large legacy of existing code and wonder why you taught them something that not related to what they're going to use.

OTOH other languages should be easier to learn by reference to a comparatively elegant language like Rust. Python, Fortran, C++ etc. have almost nothing in common but Rust could arguably be a good introductory baseline that shares features with all of these.