Indeed. That's why, in my dual role as sysadmin, I also made sure that only the members of my group had write access to the folder containing the code.

I used to develop glue code (mostly monitoring and piping data between applications) for a major electric utility. The systems had to run in real time 24x7. I found scripted code to be an advantage because the on-call person always had easy access to the production code in the event of a failure anywhere in the system (often due to an external problem with a data source). This meant that emergency patches were easily applied. No special development environment was required. Just because the production code was scripted doesn't mean it wasn't thoroughly tested before going live.

FORTRAN had a six char limit on variable names and I found that name like A, AA, B2, etc. were typical of code written by engineers, not comp sci graduates. And bad variable names are a problem with ALL languages. It has nothing to do with Python.