I've had only a very short experience with Visual Basic and Delphi... I don't like them, at least in the way I learned, but they were useful for me to learn MatLab later. I study aeronautical engineering, and in my field (I suppose that other engineerings do it too) Fortran has always been regarded as "the" language (we don't care much about pretty graphical interfaces) and those who aimed a bit higher would use C++. Those two were used mostly because... well, honestly I don't know why, perhaps it's easier to do maths with them, lol (in Fortran at least). You can still get openware and papers by the NASA with only Fortran coding.
Nowadays the scientific academia has moved almost completely into MatLab, at least for teaching, and those who want to be the "cool bunch" go for Java. Java is much preciated due to its graphical capabilities (airfoil analysis softwares are the best example). However, I don't see anybody going for Python in the mechanical field. In my case I already know MatLab (my thesis will be around an openware made in MatLab... ironical, isn't it?), I'm trying to do a Fortran course, and I may think of doing some Python, because many openware that I want to use are based much on it. Java would be nice, but life is short and in my case enough complicated, lol.
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