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Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

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.)

I've never really looked into Python which is strange because I use it as a "glue language" quite often. I think I'll investigate Python a bit more next time I have to actually collect and clean up the data before using it. Right now I'm more of a consumer (mostly using data from our experiments that are turned into CSV)

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Absolutely; modern Fortran is great and is syntactically rather close to Matlab (and to an extent R as well).

The main difficulty with Fortran is IMO the lack of an extensive standard library -- sure, you can find code out there to do almost anything, but then you need to figure out linking/calling conventions/possibly incompatible data models for each new library you bring in...

But, as another poster mentioned, it is quite straightforward to call Fortran from R :)

matlab was originally released as a fortran library (pre 1.0), so it keeps a lot of that heritage even though it's probably c/c++ now: http://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/the-or...

Yeah -- although doesn't it actually pre-date Fortran 90? I wonder which direction the influence went :)

> 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?").

> I'd say that Fortran is pretty suitable for numeric calculations of all sorts.

It is indeed. And R works with Fortran quite easily.

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