What position? The position I see it in is a legacy language that used to run the internet and was the first language that really worked for bioinformatics. Is it different outside science?
Yes--people who have practical experience writing and maintaining code that has to be maintained tend to write maintainable code.
Scientists (and, in my experience, especially bioinformaticians) tend to make horrible, awful messes no matter how maintainable you think a language is. (You can hand them Inform 7 and it'll still end up looking like Fortran ate the csh manual and vomited all over an APL keyboard.)
