Programming in C is the best for scientific computing.
You certainly disagree; tools like MATLAB increase productivity.
I remember when I started working as a researcher, with a lot of computing. I was facing with my professors used to dinosaurs like FORTRAN or C. MATLAB was not used too much, it was more than 20 years ago!
But MATLAB is a very professional tool, it works like a charm, and many scientific papers are done by MATLAB.
Nowadays, however, most of the students love and want to use Python, or more fashionable things like Julia or R. Python is a beauty, and it is a must for machine learning. Python is free (but many universities give access to MATLAB to the students). But I do not find it very professional. You continuously need to tweak the code, or install a missing package, or -worst of all- check with the filesystem permissions or access, because it is an interpreted language. MATLAB is also interpreted, but its ecosystem is stable and well-integrated in operating systems like Windows, OSX, or Linux. Of more than 200 papers that I wrote, only in one so far I used a Python code.
At the end of the day, for professional pictures, I use MATLAB (with some help from Illustrator or Powerpoint or Gimp, etc.). Many codes in my papers are written in MATLAB, as in the recent work on neuromorphic computing with waves. Also, the deep learning toolbox of MATLAB is valuable.
I made some papers on parallel computing, mainly by the MPI protocol. In the beginning, for MPI, I used FORTRAN, but lately (nearly 15 years ago) I switched to C++. I am still writing codes with MPI and C++, and I am practicing CUDA. You can use CUDA in Python, but you understand CUDA only by C++.
But as far as I enter in the details of a code (and I age), improve or optimize, I realize that I am progressively switching back to C. Just pure C (sic!). The reason is that at a lower programming level, I have better control of what the code does, I can understand better the side effects of some routine. In C, dealing with complex variables, or arrays is more clear to me, despite being much more complicated (but using pointers makes you feel a lot smarter!).
As a side effect, the code is simpler to read and understand, but much less cool and modern. Even if, I have to admit that maintaining a code in C++ is still more efficient for me, with respect to FORTRAN or to C, Notably enough, my last FORTRAN paper is dated 2017!
I am not a boomer, so you cannot say “ok boomer”, but I think that this python-mania is not the best for scientific computing and is not the best for students. It not only an issue of speed (and obviously C is the fastest, with FORTRAN as a good competitor). It is also a matter of how to learn to write programs for scientific computing from scratch. For me, to learn and practice scientific computing, the best is still a wise combination of C and C++, with MATLAB for visualization! While Python (and TensorFlow and all of that) gives its best in machine learning.