Another take: There's value in using a compiled language here. I'm an amateur dabbling in computational chemistry, and my weapon of choice is Rust. (After starting using Python). Why:
- Fast, in an area where speed is important
- Can be made faster for repetitive tasks by communicating with a GPU using Vulkan, CUDA etc
- Can incorporate a GUI, and 3D graphics, which helps for exploring things visually, tweaking parameters, doing time simulations etc.
- Can share. Ie, I showed my brother yesterday by sharing a 10Mb executable. Matlab has license complications and you need it installed. Sharing Python programs is a disaster. (Docker? Pip? Pyenv? Poetry? Virtualenv? System Python? System dependencies for the C and Fortran dependencies?)
