Scientists should learn to program
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Scientists should learn to program
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Scientists should learn to program
#2This is a good post (and other posts below). But... "scientists" is not a descriptive word. If you are talking about biologists, they'd gain more from knowing high school math than from programming. Math majors on the other hand need to program if they want to find jobs outside the actuarial field. Same for physics and chemistry. A regular C++/Java course should be enough to get started.
Re: Scientists should learn to program
#3As far as I've seen, most scientists work with R for statistics and TeX for papers; it sounds like this reduces to "Scientists should learn powerful tools.".
Re: Scientists should learn to program
#4I don't believe anyone who says programming is hard.
Learning to write small programs in a high-level language such as python is much easier than learning a natural language.
The former you can do in a week or less. The latter requires years.
Re: Scientists should learn to program
#5If scientists should learn programming, we should meet them halfway and learn some science.
I've always wanted to do cool numerical stuff like n-body codes, computational fluid dynamics, etc, but I never really knew where to get started.
It doesn't help that most example code out there is spaghetti garbage written in Fortran.
Re: Scientists should learn to program
#6I don't believe anyone who says programming is hard. Learning to write small programs in a high-level language such as python is much easier than learning a natural language. The former you can do in a week or less. The latter requires years.
Not so. Natural language is easier because I can learn in a minute to say "Hello world" in a language like German. But it takes forever to fluently write bug-free code for million-line projects.
It's a good question to discuss, if we can get past simplistic apples-to-oranges comparisons. On the one hand natural languages have large vocabularies and cultural context that must be assimilated over time. On the other hand pidgin German works where pidgin lisp does not - natural languages allow more error in the medium.
Re: Scientists should learn to program
#7I don't believe anyone who says programming is hard. Learning to write small programs in a high-level language such as python is much easier than learning a natural language. The former you can do in a week or less. The latter requires years.
Not so. Natural language is easier because I can learn in a minute to say "Hello world" in a language like German. But it takes forever to fluently write bug-free code for million-line projects. It's a good question to discuss, if we can get past simplistic apples-to-oranges comparisons. On the one hand natural languages have large vocabularies and cultural context that must be assimilated over time. On the other han…
It only takes a minute to learn to say "Hello World" in Python also.
I'm not talking about writing bug-free code for million-line projects. Rather, I'm taking about writing simple small programs. That's easy.
Re: Scientists should learn to program
#8I don't believe anyone who says programming is hard. Learning to write small programs in a high-level language such as python is much easier than learning a natural language. The former you can do in a week or less. The latter requires years.
When you learn a natural language, you can speak with a native speaker even if you make a lot of mistakes; he'll still understand you (and maybe try to help you improve).
Computer languages "feedback" (error messages, etc.) is poor. It's interesting: you can find hundreds of blog posts about syntax, garbage collections, string libraries or whatever but nobody seems to care about error/warning messages. It's a thing that hasn't evolved since a long time.
Re: Scientists should learn to program
#9I don't believe anyone who says programming is hard. Learning to write small programs in a high-level language such as python is much easier than learning a natural language. The former you can do in a week or less. The latter requires years.
When you learn a natural language, you can speak with a native speaker even if you make a lot of mistakes; he'll still understand you (and maybe try to help you improve). Computer languages "feedback" (error messages, etc.) is poor. It's interesting: you can find hundreds of blog posts about syntax, garbage collections, string libraries or whatever but nobody seems to care about error/warning messages. It's a thing t…
Some progress has been made:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/blerner/papers/seminal_pl...
Re: Scientists should learn to program
#10I don't believe anyone who says programming is hard. Learning to write small programs in a high-level language such as python is much easier than learning a natural language. The former you can do in a week or less. The latter requires years.
When you learn a natural language, you can speak with a native speaker even if you make a lot of mistakes; he'll still understand you (and maybe try to help you improve). Computer languages "feedback" (error messages, etc.) is poor. It's interesting: you can find hundreds of blog posts about syntax, garbage collections, string libraries or whatever but nobody seems to care about error/warning messages. It's a thing t…
>When you learn a natural language, you can speak with a native speaker even if you make a lot of mistakes; he'll still understand you...
This is simply not true, especially the last part. This comes from experience, on both ends.