I wish technical people would stop pretending that choice of programming language isn't just largely very much a personal choice and then occasionally based on whatever else the ecosystem has to offer.
Yeah, most people doing scientific computing might use Python, but then you have whole groups of people who are used to something else and would plainly prefer not to use a language for completely personal reasons.
One's lived experience may be that all languages are roughly the same, but that's only because one tends to only sink time into languages roughly the same as the ones they're familiar with. Something like 70% of languages have been derivatives of Java since Java was invented, but if you cannot imagine how programming could change meaningfully from Java then you are not trying hard enough. (In particular nobody who has learned a functional language, especially Haskell, would express this opinion.) Rust is a meaningfully different language, fundamentally requiring a different approach to design while offering much more power.
I find that practically speaking, 80 to 90% of the decision-making and what language to use boils down to what one is trying to do and what examples one can find of somebody doing something similar. For medium to large scale software, ecosystem matters most because when you get stuck you don't want to be reinventing wheels that other people have already solved.
I have definitely, for example, used Java in a project where I would rather walk on hot coals than add more Java to the world... Except the project was to write a second webserver that included all the accreted wisdom the company had built up over the years and we already had a first one written in Java.
The pain of adding more Java was offset by avoiding the pain of having to explain to a vice president how the company got hacked a second time in the exact same way we got hacked 5 years ago...
I believe that this is true in almost all situations. Using Java vs Scheme vs Python vs whatever is a personal choice that will likely have only modest impacts on the eventual quality of the system.
But the cost of unsafety in C++ is often a vuln. This makes it a meaningfully different choice.
Yeah, most people doing scientific computing might use Python, but then you have whole groups of people who are used to something else and would plainly prefer not to use a language for completely personal reasons.
Like, hey maybe the syntax sucks.