Comment by acomjean

I took a bio statistic class. The tools were Excel/ R or Stata.

I think most people used R. Free and great graphing. Though the interactivity of Excel is great for what ifs. I never got R till I took that class. Though RStudio makes R seem like scriptable excel.

R/Python are fast enough for most things though a lot of genomic stuff (Blast alignments etc..) are in compiled languages.