[bigger_cheese]

My father is a (retired) veterinary epidemiologist (i.e. he looked at spread of diseases in Animal populations) probably a function of his age but he wrote most of his models and simulations in Pascal and then switched to Basic eventually.

From my conversations with him the programming language was not the bottleneck for him it was the integration with GIS software and spatial mapping packages which caused him problems. A lot of programming languages did not mesh together very well with spatial mapping tools available to him at the time.

The first language I ever saw him use was Turbo Pascal, later he would use QBasic and GWBasic eventually he was using Visual Basic).

Towards the end of his career I believe he looked at other languages like Python and Java but I don't believe he found them very compelling. Python I believe has better spatial tools available now but it would have been relatively early in the languages life my Dad was looking at it and those packages probably did not exist.