This is very reductive of scientific computing. Maybe that conference is particularly narrowly focused on certain applications but there's plenty of people developing "real" programs (not python scripts) in academia/research labs, and you usually see those in conferences.

Look for instance at multi-purpose solvers like FreeFEM or FEniCS, or the distributed parallelism linalg libraries like PETSc or MUMPS, or more recent projects like OCCA. These are not small projects, and they care a lot about scalability and maintainability, as well as some of them being pretty "CS-y".