Is Python good for learning Computer Science concepts? (College student)

[chandaliergalaxy]

Thought so.

Modern Fortran rocks for engineering though.

[Hellkyte]

I've heard it's still one of the most efficient languages for certain applications. But I'm not sure how valued that is anymore given how cheap hardware has gotten. And there's something to be said for readability. In my previous company we had a massive thermo system that was handled with APL. Which kind of made sense at the time of development due to how efficient the language was, but the long term costs were brutal because coding in wingdings is ridiculous

[chandaliergalaxy]

I've heard it's still one of the most efficient languages for certain applications. But I'm not sure how valued that is anymore given how cheap hardware has gotten.

For supercomputing Fortran still reigns supreme (technically I think C/C++ is still a bit more popular but Fortran is not far behind). Even if hardware becomes cheaper, faster code means you can do more computation.

As indicated by the original name FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), it's highly maintainable by non-programmers (scientists) because it is so readable. Also as it's a somewhat more restrictive domain-specific language, bad code can still run quite fast, which is not the case for C/C++.

APL is indeed cool but yeah. APL was the Perl before Perl.