Which brings me to the question that I know my lurking software hackers might have an answer to. If I have to invest in learning a new language for doing the empirical side of my work, what should it be ? Here are some desiderata:
- Extensive package base: I don't want to reinvent wheels if I can avoid it. In this respect, the C++ STL is great, as is Boost, and Python has PADS, as well as many nifty packages. MATLAB is of course excellent.
- Portability: I'm sure there's an exotic language out there that does EXACTLY what I need in 0.33 lines of code. But if I write code, I want to be able to put it out there for people to use, and I'd like to use it across multiple platforms. So Lua, not so great (at least in the research community) (sorry Otfried)
- Good I/O modules: if I write code, I'll often want to send output to a graph, or plot some pictures etc. Some systems (MATLAB) are excellent for graphing data.
- Performance: I don't want to sacrifice performance too much for ease of coding. I've always been afraid of things like Java for this reason. Of course, I'm told I'm dead wrong about this.
Thoughts ?