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Would not FORTRAN make more sense than C if a real compiled language is required for performance.

Actually Fortran and C++ would be better options than C.

Actually you most probably want to learn Java or .NET, not make an enormous investment in C++ so you can do high performance stuff. If you want that kind of performance (very rare) you can contract it out. You can't contract out proof of concepts though.

True, but there is a certain stigma against those languages in HPC.

Otherwise, something like accelerate, Alea GPU or Aparapi might be better approaches.

yes but Java is such a swine to get to grips with for things like hadoop.

Back when I did MR I found Pl/1G much easier to get to grips with then having to spend 90% of your development time trying to work out the Godammed class-path and getting eclipse to work.

Actually R, Python and Scala are the best languages for data science.

All three have great library support e.g. Spark and are the primary languages for big data.