Re: [tlug] Fortran --> Python [and R] (was linux engineer)

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

>> ... all the cool people at CERN and Fermilab speak only broken fortran...
> 
> Sounds rather contradictory to me. :-)
> 
> More seriously, I hear (but don't know) that there is a slow move 
> in the scientific community from Fortran to Python. ...

I also see a lot of movement in the scientific community to R (*). But
it does depend on your type of science. R is being used where statistics
is important. R is widely used in the economics and finance areas. And R
appears to be *the* choice in biology and related sciences (but I'm not
in those areas, so I may have that wrong).

Until recently at least, R support for clusters was a bit weak, and that
combined with the fact it is a high-level language mean people needing
heavy-duty number crunching are still choosing Fortran.

Darren

P.S.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1944261/when-to-choose-r-vs-scipy
has a well balanced, though two years out-of-date comparison of R and SciPy.

*: Like any good statistician I should point out the bias here: I hang
around R communities much more than python communities. On the other
hand I started learning R and hanging around R communities because it
was being used more and more in the areas I described above, plus AI,
machine learning, etc.


-- 
Darren Cook, Software Researcher/Developer

http://dcook.org/work/ (About me and my work)
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