> Just to toss another name into the ring, I'd say that Fortran is pretty suitable for numeric calculations of all sorts. > I like R as a higher level languag

> Just to toss another name into the ring, I'd say that Fortran is pretty suitable for numeric calculations of all sorts. > I like R as a higher level language (or I guess tools like SPSS or preferably PSPP for even higher level stuff). These days I do most of my academia stuff with R (mostly hypothesis and equivalence testing and the things related to it like power analysis etc.) You can see R as some sort of glue language around libraries written in lower languages like C++, C or Fortran (I believe a large part if not all the functionalities for matrix operations used by R for linear regressions and statistican analysis (PCA) is written in Fortran). Fortran code runs much faster, but you don't want to use it to do exploratory analysis ("I have those data about people, what if I filter out the people earning more than X before checking if there is a correlation between the average age where men get married and their incomes?").