> "The language of choice in scientific computing is still Fortran, and for good reason." Except that this is not always true. R, Scala, and spark are heavily

> "The language of choice in scientific computing is still Fortran, and for good reason." Except that this is not always true. R, Scala, and spark are heavily used in bioinformatics. Physicists and quantum chemists nowadays use C++ more often than Fortran when they build new models and libraries. Astronomers use Python. The only scientific fields that get stuck forever with Fortran seem to be climate modeling and weather forecasting (and they continue to use Fortran 90 and pretend the most recent Fortran 2008 standard does not exist). Edit: I'm not saying Fortran isn't good. It's the best for bit twiddling. Offloading the performance critical part from Python or other high-level languages to Fortran is great. The problem is, in an academic setting, a lot of scientists untrained in programming choose to write programs from scratch in Fortran, which is too taxing on the debugging, testing, and maintenance time.