It may vary from one discipline to the next. My background is in physics. Every physics student learned to program. In grad school, every physics thesis involved programming. Most of the scientists I know who use Python, switched from some other language, and learned it on the fly.

Looking back over the span of 4 decades, one big change is that there is just more stuff, and the specific programming language is just a small part of it. An advantage of learning something like Python is that you can do more with it, quickly, thanks to the libraries.