Comment by Arrrlex

This isn't a reply to your substantive point (of course I agree that fortran/numpy programmers do science), but certainly when I'm coding with numpy I have a mental model of the shapes of the arrays, very akin to the mental model I have of the types of objects in e.g. Haskell or Python. Sure, the shapes are runtime properties and they're not enforced anywhere, but that doesn't matter to my mental model of what's going on.