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Statisticians commonly use SPlus or R. Applied mathematicians use some flavor of Fortran, in part because of numerical libraries available in that language. Mat
by jimfl 17y ago
Statisticians commonly use SPlus or R. Applied mathematicians use some flavor of Fortran, in part because of numerical libraries available in that language. Matlab is also in heavy currency in many disciplines.
Much of the time, a scientist is driven to a language not by any particular language feature, but by what code/tools are already available in that language that they can build upon for their own research.
- stcredzero 17y agoMany epidemiologists seem to prefer Stata. I don't know why. It's like some SQL shell out of the early 80's. I think that languages that didn't support "conventional" operator precedence lost out because that went against the expectations of science/tech types. (Smalltalk & Lisp in particular)
- joeyo 17y agoMany epidemiologists seem to prefer Stata. That seems to be a west coast thing. East coast epidemiologists that I know use some mix of S or SPSS or SAS.
- yummyfajitas 17y agoI don't know of that many applied math people using Fortran these days. If you need to use a fortran library, you can either call it directly from c, or write a wrapper (in c) which you can call from python/matlab/mathematica. Or you can probably just download the c wrapper. The only people I know who use fortran are either a) old or b) their code is very old.