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Just to toss another name into the ring, I&#x27;d say that Fortran is pretty suitable for numeric calculations of all sorts.<p>&gt; I like R as a higher level language (or I guess tools like SPSS or preferably PSPP for even higher level stuff). These days I do most of my academia stuff with R (mostly hypothesis and equivalence testing and the things related to it like power analysis etc.)<p>You can see R as some sort of glue language around libraries written in lower languages like C++, C or Fortran (I believe a large part if not all the functionalities for matrix operations used by R for linear regressions and statistican analysis (PCA) is written in Fortran).<p>Fortran code runs much faster, but you don&#x27;t want to use it to do exploratory analysis (&quot;I have those data about people, what if I filter out the people earning more than X before checking if there is a correlation between the average age where men get married and their incomes?&quot;).