Rust bandwagon

As someone who moved from physics to computer science half-way through my undergraduate degree (maths is hard!) I get your point, and Julia is definitely a lot more specialised for scientific computing than Python or Rust will ever be.

In that kind of context it probably makes sense to be moderately aggressive about moving away from C++ towards something like Rust, given the trends that seem to be developing. There's also maybe a case to be made for the Rust community working to help find ways to make the language more practical for the kind of exploratory development that Python is so good at - I don't know whether that's really viable, though, given the nature of Rust. Alternatively, pushing for Julia to give more consideration to systems development might be an option, though again I'm not sure how realistic that might be.

Good luck with your probably thankless educational challenge!