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

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 7:11 AM, Darren Cook <darren@example.com> wrote:
>> 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).


That appears true with the biology area.  The older people (i.e., me)
still use Perl; people who are new into the area tend to use Python
over Perl.  And people who would like to plot graphs use R.  There are
also nice R libraries for biology-related work, so some skip both
Python and Perl and just use R (though I hear it's quite slow for
large data sets).

Before R, a lot of biologists were using Excel.  I'm glad we're
starting to move past that...something about Excel graphs make them
look funny.  The font or the spacing on the axes or something...  :-)

Ray