
For Modern Astronomers, It’s Learn to Code or Get Left Behind - JumpCrisscross
https://www.wired.com/2017/05/modern-astronomers-teaching-code/
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NumberSix
Bah Humbug!

Many academic fields, notably including astronomy and physics, have been doing
heavy duty software development and data analysis for many decades, long
before the current "data science" hype.

Chuck Moore developed FORTH in 1968 (yes 1968) for controlling radio
telescopes:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore)

Astronomers developed a widely used interactive scripting language/tool for
astronomy data analysis known as IDL in 1977 long before vanilla Python was
created, let alone recent add-ons such as NumPy, SciPy, etc. Python is playing
catch up.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_\(programming_language\))

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in the 1980s and has been using Python
for over 10 years:
[http://www.fperez.org/py4science/2009_guido_ucb/perry_STScI4...](http://www.fperez.org/py4science/2009_guido_ucb/perry_STScI4Guido.pdf)

[http://www.stsci.edu/institute/software_hardware/pyraf/stsci...](http://www.stsci.edu/institute/software_hardware/pyraf/stsci_python)

Perry Greenfield - The Development and Future of Python at STScI
[https://youtu.be/R_UcjjUC8bE](https://youtu.be/R_UcjjUC8bE)

Only a few of many examples of software development and data analysis in
astronomy specifically.

The market leading data analysis tool SAS derived from academic agricultural
research in the 1970s. Ronald Fisher developed many of his still relevant
techniques for agricultural projects at the Rothamstead Research
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothamsted_Research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothamsted_Research))

The second biggest data analysis tool SPSS is short for Statistics Package for
Social Sciences, also came out of academic research ... in social sciences in
the 1970s.

Mathworks MATLAB is derived from numerical and statistical software developed
for physics research at the Argonne National Laboratory.
[https://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/the-o...](https://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/the-
origins-of-matlab.html)

Mathematica has its roots in Stephen Wolfram's work on SMP as a graduate
student in high energy physics (particle physics) at Caltech.
[http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/smp-symbolic-
mani...](http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/smp-symbolic-manipulation-
program/)

