It exists, it's called working in a university lab!

I am well aware of that fact. But one must wonder why they bother with it, and now the hype has been revived even further due to the recent announcement of a particular large company...

I settled on a combination between Python and Perl (depending on if a lot of parsing is necessary or not). But when a lot of data is involved I go for the old fashioned choice of Fortran. It might not be pretty, and it sure as hell isn't the easiest language; but it beats the crap out of everything else when it comes to speed and convenience for parallelisation. People often forget that this is what Fortran was supposed to be good at, and it really is if you take the time to learn how to use it. Throw in Intel's Fortran compiler and a small cluster and you can chew through gigabytes of data at amazing speeds. The only thing it misses is visualisation tools, but you have a few good opensource dataset viewers, and you can always use Matlab or Python when necessary.

Well, it sort of makes sense to use actually! A trick I've run into on a few occasions is to have a small javascript run on page load that replaces it with more modern variants if javascript is available.

And rightfully so!!!

My main concern with all these cold fusion guys is how they're usually unwilling to respond to requests for more information on the experimental setups. For me that just shouts "fraud", since they have absolutely no reason to keep it under the wraps: you're never going to get it past a patent clerk anyway and if you had something that produced enough power you'd be heading for the market.

VMs are fine, until you need to interface with hardware like lab equipment that is...

Same story, it's a joke password I've been using for the past 8 years or so for sites I don't trust or throw away accounts.

Killing yourself while climbing into a volcano sounds less stupid than throwing a bucket of water over your head and claiming it is good for research into a diseases.

Whatever floats their boat, it's still stupid.

Well, its still less stupid than throwing a bucket of ice water over your head and then posting it on Facebook.

But building a drone that could work in a volcano would be pretty challenging, lets give it a go!

And I can totally imagine them coming home and their grandparents asking them "Where did you go this year?" in the most obnoxious wasy possible, like all grandparents do. Good luck explaining this one!

Lua at least has a standard, can't say the same about Fortran where you just sort of decide whatever the hell you want to use at the time of writing your code. Oh, and you'll just love VHDL where you can make up array indices as you go, no questions asked.

Compilers actually started reading code though :(

I would like to add one thing: People forget that a kernel has to run on pretty much bare metal. If you're lucky you have BIOS there helping you a bit at the start, but not really. (Yay for obscure backwards compatibility tricks that the folks at Microsoft, IBM and Intel came up with.) So your standard libraries are usually quite limited, if you have them at all. And even then they're usually too slow to deal with anyway, so you end up rewriting everything in X86 assembly anyway.