Syntactically, Python code looks like executable pseudo code. Program development using Python is 5-10 times faster than using C/C++, and 3-5 times faster than using Java. In many cases, a prototype of an application can be written in Python without writing any C/C++/Java code. More on softwareengineering.stackexchange.com

C is compiled down to a platform-dependent binary executable (e.g., a .exe file on Windows). You can't take one of these binaries and run it on a different operating system, as it has been compiled to run for a specific operating system. C does not have a runtime/garbage collector, which means that you have to manually manage the memory allocation of your program (see malloc and free). One has to be careful when managing the memory of their program, as there's an entire class of memory bugs that managed languages (languages with a garbage collector, for instance) don't have. In fact, since C is a lower level language, it does not give you many of the features that other languages have out of the box, such as generics, interfaces, classes, or lambdas. However, because C is such a bare-metal language, it is supported across the most computer architecture, can be optimized to run incredibly quickly, and can use extremely little resources. Java, like C, is a compiled language. However, it does not get compiled down to binary files, but rather to an intermediate representation known as JVM byte code (.class files). This can then be interpreted (see the Java JIT) by a platform dependent program known as the Java Runtime Environment. Java programs are garbage collected, which means that the interpreter itself will ensure that your objects and variables are allocated and deallocated as necessary, which protects Java programs from a whole range of memory bugs that C suffers from. This comes at a performance cost, as this means that your program suffers from the overhead of having to run both itself and this garbage collector in the background. Java has language features such as interface, classes, generics, lambdas, and foreach loops that can be leveraged to write safer and cleaner code. Python is a dynamically typed and interpreted language. Whereas it's possible to detect type errors at compile time in C and Java (i.e., trying to pass a boolean into a function that expects an integer), Python will not detect these type errors until it tries to execute that section of the code. The python interpreter will directly interpret your .py file (that's half true, the interpreter will create .pyc files to prevent having to parse a file multiple times). This means that there is no compilation step necessary to execute Python source code. Python, like Java, is a garbage collected language. It has a plethora of language features such as list comprehensions, generators, coroutines/async, and literals for datatypes such as lists, sets, and dictionaries. While this will vary from program to program, Python will typically be slower than Java, and much slower than C. To summarize, C is statically typed, low-level, and essentially has no run-time. Java is statically typed, garbage-collected, and compiled to an intermediate representation that then gets executed by a platform-dependent run-time environment. Python is dynamically typed and interpreted with a large amount of language features, albeit with generally worse performance. More on reddit.com

Python might be the easiest to start with. And it is quite useful under Linux to automate certain things for example. More on reddit.com

Since you have used MATLAB and R, I would suggest Python. Python has data visualization libraries, numerical libraries, etc. So if your background is more into data related stuff, Python has stuff aimed at that community (why Python was picked is unclear, because it could have been Ruby). But Python can be used to make web applications, games (maybe not like C# or C++). It has object oriented features, etc. The main complaint is that it's slow compared, say, C++. Try not to pigeonhole languages for one purpose. C# was developed because Microsoft was told to stop their work on Java, so they built a Java clone. They didn't think "Oh, this is just like Java, so we shouldn't bother creating this language". People often write languages because this feature or that feature annoys them, and they want to "fix" it with something better. Arguably, Java was created because people thought C++ was too complex and that maybe it was time for a non-functional programming language to use a garbage collector. They went through features they felt were creating complications in C++ (multiple inheritance, pass-by-value, memory allocation, etc) and cleaned it up (although Java is a pretty verbose language). It's just like if you wanted to buy a Honda vs a Toyota. These car manufacturers don't decide to create vehicles that fulfill a niche. To some extent, that can be true of languages. Even the idea of a programmer sitting down to do a project and "picking an appropriate" language doesn't always happen. If your group is good with Python, then they might not bother with doing the code in Java or C++. With whatever limitations a language has, familiarity with how it works is often more important. Also, although people love languages, there's more to programming than learning a language. More on reddit.com