Not even a requirement -- some of the elderly scientists I've worked with get by on spreadsheets! I did a tutorial on Git for my lab group in grad school -- the

Not even a requirement -- some of the elderly scientists I've worked with get by on spreadsheets! I did a tutorial on Git for my lab group in grad school -- there was some code under SVN at the time, but most folks didn't really use version control at all. (One nerve-wracking instance, I had to revert some months-old changes to our instrument control code, with only my memory to go on, because a bug I'd introduced was holding up someone else's experiment.) Most people in my field use either IDL or Python (if they're doing data analysis) or C/Fortran (for heavy-duty simulations). Some also know Matlab or Mathematica. I've been trying to convert people to Julia -- it's gonna supplant Python for data analysis and maybe even C/Fortran for simulations.