Yep, autocorrect I guess. My point being if someone is just doing a little string work than she'll scripting can be very performant and also dead simple.

I normally think of scientific programming as something involving lots of large matrices, but that isn't the case for everything.

>I normally think of scientific programming as something involving lots of large matrices, but that isn't the case for everything.

It typically is. If you have the right libraries, it's only a few lines of code to do a lot of math. C = A + B could be matrix math, not just single variables being added.

In my experience yes, but I started thinking about stuff like the human genome project which was mostly done with Perl scripts and BioPerl in the year 2000 iirc. I assume that is mostly just regex work dealing with very large strings. Is it scientific computing? Yes, just not as how I typically view scientific computing.