This is a bit earlier than I thought, but things seem to be going swimmingly, so I'd like to push forward a bit.

What should we use for code? We've got LOTS of choices here, and basically anything will work for us.

But, why should we choose a particular language over another? I would ask that you consider the following (if you do not see a language here, bring it up in the comments and I will add it if it seems reasonable):

As a personal note, I would like to run this program on a linux distro - primarily because the Parallelia board that I'm going to get to put this all on is a linux board. So while Windows languages can work, it's likely going to be a lot of work of fighting with the compiler just to get it to work (I'm looking at you C#...)

1) Accessibility: We want a language that everyone can use. COBOL is a language that has been used for many years, but no one would consider using it these days (normally). Primarily, we would want a language that has good community support, a free compiler, and free tutorials available so that people can learn the language if they don't know it.

• Good languages from this category would be C, C , C#, Java, Python, and other open domain languages.

2) Speed: Fortran 77 is very, very fast but no one in this day and age would consider using it (normally). Python on the other hand is slow (Civ4 was built using python and it chugs late game with large worlds). This website appears to have benchmarks on language speeds. The faster the language we have, the more calculations we can do (that's a good thing).

• Good languages here would be C, C , or Scala. At the end of the day, most languages will work good in the short run, but we want stuff that will go out for the long haul (billions to trillions of cycles of runtime).

3) 3rd Party support: If we decide that we want graphics (which seems to be a popular thing), we need to consider a language that works with an already existing graphics library. I have previous experience with Ogre, but openGL is another excellent graphics engine.

• Languages that I know of that have access to this stuff: C and C .

I would like to hear the thoughts of the community (because I think it's plain what language I want to work with) because this is going to be a group effort.

A quick note: if you know an object oriented language, then getting used to C isn't hard. Bear in mind that it's frustrating and will take a while, but they're all pretty similar when it comes down to it.