Python is popular precisely because non-programmers are able to rearrange snippets and write rudimentary programs without a huge time investment in learning the language or tooling. It’s a very high level language with syntactic sugar that has a lot of data science libraries which can call C code for performance, which makes it great for data scientists.

It would be a huge detriment and time sink for these data scientist to take the time to learn to write an equivalent C program if their ultimate goal is to do data science.