I will soon start a PhD in computational social sciences where I will study systems like Schelling’s model, it’s possible that I will also have to play around with networks.
I already noticed Python is too slow for the task, that’s why I thought using Fortran instead (also I did a bit of fortran when I was a student).
I was wondering, are there some people in CSS who use Fortran? I think in my advisor’s lab people use Julia or C++.
Also, are there some tools to model networks? Things similar to Networkx for instance.
this would be super interesting! I am not familiar with any networking modelling tools but there’s no reason not to start one that can go fast. Feel free to ask more questions about how you could set it.
If you want to use containers like graphs, I don’t recommend Fortran. You will probably kick yourself later for not learning C++ instead. C++ has an entire containers part of its standard library and boost is basically a standard library extension if the expansive standard library isn’t enough (boost has a good graph library which sounds like what you want).
That being said, Fortran is a pretty easy language and has built in support for matrices (there is just 1 matrix. you don’t have to worry about some libraries matrix type when using multiple libraries). This is why I use it personally: I just do a bunch of computations with matrices so I don’t need the added complexity of C++.