jmhimara

I'd be willing to bet there are already books like this for python. Or at least online tutorials. I know for a fact there are python books dedicated to scientific programming, but they probably assume some knowledge of science and focus more on the codding aspect.

I've heard that before, usually from people with no experience in actual scientific computing. There's nothing wrong with using functional programming in scientific applications. I do. But I don't see how it's "specifically" good for scientific programming.

The thing about performance in scientific programming, it is often binary: You either need the very best, or you don't care about it at all. Unlike other areas of programming, there is no middle ground. If you need your scientific code to be performant, then you need to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your hardware, which you can only do with something like Fortran or C. If you don't care about performance, then it doesn't matter. That's why Python is so popular.

Ideally I would love for something like F# to replace python in the scientific computing space, but the ecosystem is so much larger in python. That's what matters to most scientists.

Not sure if this is what you're talking about, but you don't typically pay to get a PhD (in fact you get paid in the US).