Another option that could be cheap or free (if your university offers license deals, as mine does) is SPSS. It has a lot of the quick and dirty spreadsheet functionality of Excel, is much faster than Excel with large tables, has lots of good analysis tools, has its own scripting language, and is compatible with R and Python.
Eric On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 2:21 PM, Jacob Keller < j-kell...@fsm.northwestern.edu> wrote: > It turns out that the syntax and semantics of all reasonable programming >> languages are very similar, or fall into only a few classes (e.g. C-like, >> S-expressions, etc.), so once you are "fluent" in one from a class, it's >> easy to pick up the others. This can't be said of natural languages, which >> are full of idioms and grammatical exceptions, even in closely related >> dialects. >> > > This is more opinions than I can shake a stick at! Don't we all have other > fish to fry (or for the French, other cats to whip? Other national > equivalents?) Anyway, I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of > rocking chairs to ask this question, and look at the Pandora's box that > this has opened! > > Java anyone?! I've actually noticed a bit of a dearth of Java in the > crystallography world, with some exceptions... > > Thanks everybody for your suggestions--I will mull them over, since you > all make such good arguments (not meant in the programming sense, but > probably that's true too!), > > Jacob > > > > > >> James >> >> >> [1] >> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/08/computer-languages-arent-human-languages.html >> [2] http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/englishlikeness_monster > > > > > -- > ******************************************* > Jacob Pearson Keller > Northwestern University > Medical Scientist Training Program > email: j-kell...@northwestern.edu > ******************************************* >
