C

If you want it to be fast, use C.

This is as true today as it has ever been.

Discussions

Timeline

Bibiography

Kernighan, B. and Ritchie, D., The C Programming Language (2nd Edition), Prentice Hall, 1988.
Press, M. H. et al, Numerical Recipes in C, CUP, 1988.

See also entries in the language-independent bibliography.