However, I have read enough Fortran and C++ written by scientists, to fervently wish that their code had been written in Julia instead. In Julia, I don't think they could manage to write code so debauched. If you just do things the naive way, usually life is good and code is both readable and fast.

The pitfall is type instability and memory allocation, but I think with a few basic tricks, people can learn to avoid this, especially for simpler tasks. (edit: also, if people do mess this up, they notice because their code is slow. whereas people don't notice if their code is fast but incomprehensible and impossible to maintain or extend.)