What you say describes my experience 10 to 15 years ago, not my experience today. Compare the settings dialog in KDE Plasma to the windows settings dialog for instance. Or should I say myriad of Windows settings dialogues.

What was difficult in your experience?

Mostly ML or data processing libraries I would assume, I’ve read tons of REST server and ORM python code for instance, none of that is written in C.

Wrt rust: no experience with that. I do do a lot of C++, there you quickly reach the end as typically you’re consuming quite a bit of libraries but the complete sources of those aren’t part of what is parsed by the IDE as keeping all that in memory would be unworkable.

My point about the jumping into was that you can immediately start reading the sources. Most alternative languages are compiled in some form or other so all you’ll see is an API, not the implementation.

As a researcher: all the professional software engineers here have no idea about the requirements for code in a research setting.

As someone with extensive experience in both: my first requirement would be readability. Single python file? Fine with that. 1k+ lines single python file without functions or other means of structuring the code: please no.

The nice thing about python is that your IDE let’s you jump into the code of the libraries you’re using, I find that to be a good way to look at how experienced python devs write code.