My scientific computing journey was

- Matlab in the first few science lab courses + first CS course.

- C++ in second CS course

- Fortran for the scientific computing course

I found Fortran worse than matlab. The error messages were difficult to parse, and it was much more difficult to do step through debugging like in matlab.

But later I learned Python, and now use it professionally to do scientific computing, and I would give anything to go back to Fortran. Or use Rust or Julia. Or if Wolfram/Mathematica if that was possible. Anything but Python.

The fundamental problem with Python is that all the math is hacked into it, unlike Julia/Matlab/Mathematica where the math takes first priority and other values are secondary.

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noobermin 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

May be you learned all of these extremely recently before for decades I would definitely say C++ error messages were far worse than anything a fortran compiler has ever barked at me for. The bad days are definitely over but I still think C++ template errors can still be the thing of horrors even today. I know you compared matlab to fortran but you even said you took C++ just prior to this and I'm amazed that didn't harden you for anything gfortran/ifort would throw at you.

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bluedino 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What are the obstacles in your using Fortran (or Rust or Julia) in place of Python?

	▲	abdullahkhalids 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Many other researchers I work with have almost no programming experience outside of Python or other high-level languages. Switching to Fortran or Rust will significantly slow down our work for at least an year or two while people catch up. Julia would be easier to switch, but it's still months of work to port over existing libraries.

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naijaboiler 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

correct. Python is a general purpose language pretending to speak math.