> Python is very teachable. Given a class of average 19 year old students from a numerate discipline, my colleagues will teach most of them Python to a reasonable standard in a single module
Compared to Perl, sure, Python is teachable. But I'm willing to speculate that Safe Rust as a semi-pure functional language (basically: when in doubt, .clone() all the things and don't even think about the minor hit to performance) can also be taught as a first-time programming language. Rust may be at a disadvantage to Python wrt. bindings to the existing ecosystem of C/C++/F0RTRAN scientific codes, but that's a temporary state of things.
To science majors? No. It lacks so many of the things you'd need to get them started (e.g. a REPL/notebook server, interactive plotting, a "here's everything you need" install (a.k.a conda)), and most (but not all) students have no real interest in learning to program. You could get the interested-in-programming ones to learn Rust, but then they're going to hit the large legacy of existing code and wonder why you taught them something that not related to what they're going to use.
There's an interesting experimental project for a Rust REPL and notebook interface at https://github.com/google/evcxr . Other things, e.g. semi-officially endorsed collections of community crates with no strong backward compatibility guarantees, have seen some development already.
> but then they're going to hit the large legacy of existing code and wonder why you taught them something that not related to what they're going to use.
OTOH other languages should be easier to learn by reference to a comparatively elegant language like Rust. Python, Fortran, C++ etc. have almost nothing in common but Rust could arguably be a good introductory baseline that shares features with all of these.
Compared to Perl, sure, Python is teachable. But I'm willing to speculate that Safe Rust as a semi-pure functional language (basically: when in doubt, .clone() all the things and don't even think about the minor hit to performance) can also be taught as a first-time programming language. Rust may be at a disadvantage to Python wrt. bindings to the existing ecosystem of C/C++/F0RTRAN scientific codes, but that's a temporary state of things.