There are many languages around: C++, JAVA, PASCAL, and so on. I
tried to learn C++ and JAVA, but ended up criticizing them. Is it
because C was my first programming language?
I could not understand why people are using and talking about other
programming languages.
One uses the best tool for the task at hand.
At work, these days I mostly use two programming languages,
MATLAB and Maple.
MATLAB has been designed to provide interactive prototyping of a mix of
array operations and graphics; it is suitable for the needs of my major
task because that major task involves R&D of a package for visualizing
the results of performing various mathematical operations upon data
sets. Formal design is not especially practical in our environment,
as we change our mind several times a day about what we're trying to do,
as our experiences or further thoughts or additional papers tell us
more about what does or does not work, so a prototyping language is
appropriate for the task. When we've figured out what we want done
and how it should be done, a team will take it over and re-write it
in a structured language such as C or C++.
Maple I use to compute symbolic formulae. It has an extensive
library of symbolic manipulation routines; it would be completely
impractical for us to use C to write routines to do complicated
symbolic integration. No point in re-inventing the wheel!
I don't use Maple for any kind of hard-core numeric evaluation
of data: I use it to figure out good ways to express formulae.
For example, for solving simultaneous non-linear equations
and then finding a compact form for expressing the parametric
form of the intersection.