Ask Slashdot: Best Language To Learn For Scientific Computing?

New submitter longhunt writes "I just started my second year of grad school and I am working on a project that involves a computationally intensive data mining problem. I initially coded all of my routines in VBA because it 'was there'. They work, but run way too slow. I need to port to a faster language. I have acquired an older Xeon-based server and would like to be able to make use of all four CPU cores. I can load it with either Windows (XP) or Linux and am relatively comfortable with both. I did a fair amount of C and Octave programming as an undergrad. I also messed around with Fortran77 and several flavors of BASIC. Unfortunately, I haven't done ANY programming in about 12 years, so it would almost be like starting from scratch. I need a language I can pick up in a few weeks so I can get back to my research. I am not a CS major, so I care more about the answer than the code itself. What language suggestions or tips can you give me?"

Comments

English

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously.

BAD TIM! BAD!

[girlintraining]

What language suggestions or tips can you give me?"

Timothy, shame on you. You should know better than to start a holy war.

Re:Python

[SJHillman]

VB is feeding your scrotum to a python.

My favorite is CnH2n+1OH

[nanospook]

It take all the work out of the computations..

Re:Java Java!

[Atzanteol]

I tried out those benchmarks myself.

Java:
$ time java nbody 50000000
-0.169075164
-0.169059907

real 0m8.863s
user 0m8.820s
sys 0m0.016s

Not too shabby. But checkout the C++ times!
$ time ./nbody.gpp-7.gpp_run
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

real 0m0.097s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

OMG that's a ton faster!

Re:PDL

[Roger W Moore]

The power of Perl + the speed of C

...and the readability of machine code?

Re:Python

[Just Some Guy]

I wrote some Perl that looked like the output of AES once.