For astronomers, what software/languages do you use to handle data?

[astroman707]

For all the astronomers and astrophysicists out there, what are your preferred methods of dealing with large swaths of data? What are your go to programming languages, and software?

 

[andrew s 1905]

Python seems to be popular but I am not a professional astronomer .
Regards Andrew.

 

[jim mcnamara]

You have asked this question twice. It is not a simple as you would like.

So this is an example a project I worked on. It is not astronomy. But see the last paragraph.

We developed what power engineers call a state estimator. This is the net for a company's part of the power grid. It let's power companies do things like determine how much wheeling has gone on or through their system. (tracking power that belongs to another company)

Large projects are constrained by history and cost. Just as in most areas of engineering and science. If you have something software/hardware wise that works well you do not rewrite it. You keep using it. You do not want to debug an extra 30,000 lines of new FORTRAN.

Languages and databases involved, note that some are very old:

Old SCADA - DCL (shell),  DEC FORTRAN, Userbase, DEC BASIC

HPUX - FORTRAN90, LAPACK (linear algebra), ksh88 (shell), Oracle, Pro-COBOL, Pro-C (C for Oracle), Assembler code, Stat Pak, Perl

Windows - Oracle Forms, Perl, Visual Studio C++, VB 6

This same hodge podge happens lots of places because it is more efficient in terms of cost and time to use something someone else wrote way back when, than to roll you own. I chatted with a tech guy down at the VLA radio astronomy center. Guess what? They had the same mish mash of languages and platforms plus analog FFT boxes. Way cool.

So your answer is: several languages and platforms

 

[phyzguy]

For all the astronomers and astrophysicists out there, what are your preferred methods of dealing with large swaths of data? What are your go to programming languages, and software?

I work on an astronomy project that generates huge amounts of data. Most code is written in Python, and the parts of the code that handle large amounts of data or are very compute intensive are written in C or C++. However, for most users, the C/C++ part is hidden, since they are just calling python routines. More and more, the Python code is being written with Jupyter notebooks. It's really quite amazing. You can write a Jupyter notebook and with a few lines of code pull in and analyze very large amounts of data in a short time.