Why Python rocks for research
This article makes some fairly convincing arguments that Python is a more flexible tool than Matlab or Perl, but I can't help but come away with the sense that the author hasn't tried many other languages.There are an awful lot of languages that provide iterators, a powerful set of data structures, extensive libraries and facilities for structuring and maintaining large codebases. .Net languages (maybe F# would be good for this?), Java or most of the emerging languages for the JVM stack, Ruby (which is generally considered to be "different but equivalent" to Python), and so forth.