[chuckleMuscle]

Very different use-cases. All the other languages you've mentioned are great for statistical analysis and plotting but are quite slow - for R and Python by virtue of being interpreted rather than compiled. I dont know about the others. Fortran is often used in academia for intensive number crunching and parallelized code to run on computing clusters with 10s or 100s of cores. I work with some people who run hydrodynamics sims using a code written in FORTRAN. Their workflow is to pull data from these sims into Python scripts for subsequent analysis. It's just a different tool for a different job. People talk about C++ and FORTRAN being competitors, and there the difference might have something to do with familiarity.

[angus-g]

> with 10s or 100s of cores

You could probably even add another zero (almost two) to this