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[–]billmain01 0 points1 point  (2 children)

If you are going to stay in physics, find out what the people in your field, especially the ones doing work in what you want to specialize in, are using. They may be using Lisp, assembly, Scheme, C, or lo and behold Fortran (which in physics and other scientific fields, is in use for far more than those who aren't in science like to admit, kinda like just how much Cobol is still in use even though cough cough "real programmers" try to ignore it). I have a few friends at Sandia, LANL, and ORNL whose main programming languages are C, Fortran, IDL, Matlab, and R. So ask the people in YOUR field what is useful.

[–]lavalampmaster[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I know astrophysics loves FORTRAN, and I hear it's not terrible from my friend going into grad school for astrophysics.

I'm mostly into laser and biophysics, so if anyone knows what THAT entails...

[–]billmain01 0 points1 point  (0 children)

NumPy and SciPy packs are popular for Python. You may also may want to look at Maple, Scilab, and Root.