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IMO it's because researchers like it, because you can slap together some super sloppy hacky mess prototype and it will usually work. More germain languages stop you from from generating pure chaos.

Researchers also love excel, Fortran, and Matlab. Let that sink in for a bit.

Bring the downvotes hahaha



This is true. I primarily write research code as well as some code that goes to prod.

I love writing Python for exactly the reason you've mentioned. If something that needs to be re-written in a "proper" language, we've guys that can write that thing in them quickly and I don't need to worry about them that much. Did I mention those guys usually gets paid half as much as I do? As long as things work man.


  > Did I mention those guys usually gets paid half as much as I do?
You certainly did! Congratulations on being a more valuable person than a software engineer.


I think he's software engineer too. Just the one who's paid more for figuring what to write, not how to write it.


Matlab (Octave), Fortran, Python, Excel - congratulations, you have won our Masters of Computational Physics language bingo!

(Well, there's also C, LabView, SQL and Java, but they are less prominent.)


So, which is it, "will usually work" or "pure chaos"?




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