The answer is that your sample is flawed. Scientists can turn anything into a "disgusting mashup of a language". Perl is in its position for a reason.
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.)
You have made my day.