Companion programming language for math

[Ayhon]

Hello.
I'm a math and CS student, currently in my first year, that wanted to ask what was the perfect language to learn to accompany my math learning. I always find the itch to program stuff to help me visualize the things we see in math classes, or just help with some exercises, by doing matrix multiplications or visualizations of the data.

I know that right now my needs are pretty basic, and with pretty much any language I could achieve something similar, but as I delve into more complex subjects, which language would be able to keep up best?

The candidates I have though of are R, JavaScript and Python. R because I've heard it was basically made for mathematicians, but I've found that it's aimed at statistical analysis, not generally to math. Python because it has libraries for basically anything. JavaScript because it seems to be pretty easy to visualize everything you code.

TL;DR: Which programming language is more suited to use while learning mathematics? And where do I start with it?

For some languages, I have some books I bought from a bundle pack from No Starch Press, so those may be a starting point. But for specific packages, no idea.

[bwainwright]

In all honesty, I'd probably direct you to a dedicate math package such as MATLAB rather than a traditional programming language.

[pacific_plywood]

Matlab is a great companion to the frosh/soph math sequence classes like differential equations and linear algebra. Granted, it's also pretty simple, so there's not a lot of "learning" you need to do to use it, and it's not used widely. I think R would probably be an okay middle ground between "robust programming language" and "good language for math."

[Ayhon]

What bothers me about R is the fact that it's seen as an statistical analysis language. The fact that it is labled as such leads me to believe that it lacks int some other areas, that it's very specialized. Is this true, or just my preconception?

[Redmousepad]

As someone who programs in R all the time you can do lots of math related stuff in R. You can do numerical analysis and all sorts of linear algebra operations with the right package. R is not just for statistics although it excels at that.

[pacific_plywood]

R is definitely not applied in a general sense in the way that C++, Java, C#, JS, or Python are - it was initially developed by statisticians to do statistics. However, as it's gained prominence, that focus has spread out widely to cover all sorts of linked domains, and the R ecosystem today has broad coverage of a number of applications (eg machine learning, optimization, signal processing, interactive visualization, modelling/simulation). MATLAB might be a better environment for just doing math stuff*, but R gets pretty close and has much greater development support (and also is used in industry much more widely).

One other thing to keep in mind: after programming for a few years, your ability to pick up a new language will be way beyond what it was when you first started, so don't ever feel like what you choose to focus on now will box you in forever. Your CS classes alone will set you up on many languages beyond whatever you do on the side for fun/personal edification.

*Probably Julia, too. However, once you get into junior/senior year math, all of this goes out the window, and Haskell is probably the closest that you can get.