I still have a Clip+/Rockbox that I load up with meditation tracks. I don't feel as bad falling asleep with this thing clipped to me as I would my phone.
I understand that I am severely limiting my options in tech employment by not moving to SF or NY, but the all-out assault on freedoms prevalent in both regions is a total dealbreaker.
Honestly because it's easier. Modern scientific computing is actually dominated by C, which powers a lot of the libraries that do the crunching behind the scenes. Python has some fantastic connectors that can bind to C libraries and run computationally-intensive code very close to the machine. This makes the programming behind a lot of scientific computing look more like loading a library and running it with different input variables. This way grad students who are doing computational science but who do not have a background in computer science can get running fairly quickly.