What are some alternative programming languages for scientific applications?

[Chloe Soza]

Hi PF,
My name is Chloe and I'm an undergraduate student studying math, with an emphasis in actuarial science. As much as I love math, my coursework lately requires me to take more economics and finance than advanced math. Even after graduation and entering the workforce this year, I hope to continue learning more math and some programming.

 

[jedishrfu]

Welcome to PF!

What kind of programming are you interested in?

 

[Chloe Soza]

Welcome to PF!

What kind of programming are you interested in?

I've taken an introductory Java course, but I think the most beneficial things for me to learn next would be VBA and MatLab

 

[jedishrfu]

Java was an excellent choice and you might want to stick with over VBA. MS has been pushing C# more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications

MATLAB is good. Many institutions and some companies rely on it for engineering research. Eventually the MATLAB work is converted into a production language like Java or C++. Increasingly its Java because of its massive impact on web applications.

I found an interesting alternative to MATLAB based on Python called Pyzo. Its a packaged version of Python+IDE+Python math libraries for scientific applications. So if you have any interest in Python you might want to check it out.

www.pyzo.org

Since you're interested in Actuarial Science then perhaps R would be another one to check out. Its main focus is on statistical work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)

 

[Chloe Soza]

Java was an excellent choice and you might want to stick with over VBA. MS has been pushing C# more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications

MATLAB is good. Many institutions and some companies rely on it for engineering research. Eventually the MATLAB work is converted into a production language like Java or C++. Increasingly its Java because of its massive impact on web applications.

I found an interesting alternative to MATLAB based on Python called Pyzo. Its a packaged version of Python+IDE+Python math libraries for scientific applications. So if you have any interest in Python you might want to check it out.

www.pyzo.org

Since you're interested in Actuarial Science then perhaps R would be another one to check out. Its main focus is on statistical work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)

Thanks so much for the suggestions!