Studying astronomy in college right now, what language will be the most useful for me down the road?

Studying astronomy in college right now, what language will be the most useful for me down the road?

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Whatever most libraries you'll be using are written in. It'll probably be a few languages. I imagine it's something that works well with large amounts of data

>astronomy

probably python or R

r-project.org/about.html
python.org/

Latin

>he went to college to study astrology
whats your second major? liberal arts?

Python, Java and SQL

OP said astronomy, not astrology.

...

Russian and Chinese.

x86 Assembler
C++
Matlab

2nd this. also rstudio for an ide with r

Explanation for this.

> x86 Assembler
> C++
If you end up programming for really old telescopes, radios, or other oddball hardware, you'll need to know how to program that hardware.
C++ is great for the overall controller stuff, and Assembler is for plugging in all the bits and pieces that need to be ported over from Fortran. It might be worth learning fortran so you can understand existing codebases.

>C++
>Matlab
You'll be doing a fuckton of image processing, and these are the best languages to do it in. Matlab for shifting data round, and C++ for using GPU accelerated image processing libraries.

not OP but ty, aside from matlab I thought you were being sarcastic.

>astronomy
lmao

MatLab and a bunch of scripting languages.

Yeah, Astronomy is a pretty interesting science from computing perspective. At the end of the day, 99% of what you do is take pictures of the sky, run them through image processing software, and figure out what patterns are there.

Oh, and until you get to the top of the field, you won't get any time on the new telescopes, so you'll be taking pictures with computers from the 70's through 90's, which is why the old laguages are useful.

Astronomy is a respectable science.

MATLAB

lol makes sense. Do you work in the field or is it a hobby for you?

English, TeX

Astrophysics is where it's at. You'll be doing a lot more programming when you're living in a lab down by the river.

I did some in undergrad.

>dude photons have momentum but no mass lmao

>not understanding that momentum is ultimately related to energy, because mass is energy
nigga why you even here

Who the fuck says that photons have no mass

All particle physicists.
Photons move at the speed of light precisely because if they had mass, it would require infinite energy to accelerate them to exactly the speed of light.

So, the speed of light is better described as "the speed of a massless object" or "The speed of massless particles". It also can move at no other speed and accelerates to top speed in zero time when it is created.

*no rest mass

sage since it is good at math