Ask Slashdot: Best Language To Learn For Scientific Computing? 465
New submitter longhunt writes "I just started my second year of grad school and I am working on a project that involves a computationally intensive data mining problem. I initially coded all of my routines in VBA because it 'was there'. They work, but run way too slow. I need to port to a faster language. I have acquired an older Xeon-based server and would like to be able to make use of all four CPU cores. I can load it with either Windows (XP) or Linux and am relatively comfortable with both. I did a fair amount of C and Octave programming as an undergrad. I also messed around with Fortran77 and several flavors of BASIC. Unfortunately, I haven't done ANY programming in about 12 years, so it would almost be like starting from scratch. I need a language I can pick up in a few weeks so I can get back to my research. I am not a CS major, so I care more about the answer than the code itself. What language suggestions or tips can you give me?"
English (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously.
BAD TIM! BAD! (Score:5, Funny)
What language suggestions or tips can you give me?"
Timothy, shame on you. You should know better than to start a holy war.
Re:Python (Score:5, Funny)
VB is feeding your scrotum to a python.
My favorite is CnH2n+1OH (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Java Java! (Score:5, Funny)
I tried out those benchmarks myself.
Java:
$ time java nbody 50000000
-0.169075164
-0.169059907
real 0m8.863s
user 0m8.820s
sys 0m0.016s
Not too shabby. But checkout the C++ times! ./nbody.gpp-7.gpp_run
$ time
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
real 0m0.097s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
OMG that's a ton faster!
Re:PDL (Score:5, Funny)
The power of Perl + the speed of C
Re:Python (Score:5, Funny)
I wrote some Perl that looked like the output of AES once.