For Modern Astronomers, It’s Learn to Code or Get Left Behind
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Many academic fields, notably including astronomy and physics, have been doing heavy duty software development and data analysis for many decades, long before the current "data science" hype.
Chuck Moore developed FORTH in 1968 (yes 1968) for controlling radio telescopes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore
Astronomers developed a widely used interactive scripting language/tool for astronomy data analysis known as IDL in 1977 long before vanilla Python was created, let alone recent add-ons such as NumPy, SciPy, etc. Python is playing catch up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language)
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in the 1980s and has been using Python for over 10 years: http://www.fperez.org/py4science/2009_guido_ucb/perry_STScI4...
http://www.stsci.edu/institute/software_hardware/pyraf/stsci...
Perry Greenfield - The Development and Future of Python at STScI https://youtu.be/R_UcjjUC8bE
Only a few of many examples of software development and data analysis in astronomy specifically.
The market leading data analysis tool SAS derived from academic agricultural research in the 1970s. Ronald Fisher developed many of his still relevant techniques for agricultural projects at the Rothamstead Research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothamsted_Research)
The second biggest data analysis tool SPSS is short for Statistics Package for Social Sciences, also came out of academic research ... in social sciences in the 1970s.
Mathworks MATLAB is derived from numerical and statistical software developed for physics research at the Argonne National Laboratory. https://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/the-o...
Mathematica has its roots in Stephen Wolfram's work on SMP as a graduate student in high energy physics (particle physics) at Caltech. http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/smp-symbolic-mani...