
Scientists should learn to program - kkim
http://cns2.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-11.html#e2007-11-20T13_28_03.htm
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henning
If 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.

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michaelneale
It would be kind of fun to "pair program" with a scientist like that. Each
learning from each other. You know the details to keep the machine happy, he
knows the details to get the formulas right. Together == cool things.

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pixcavator
This 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.

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lsb
As 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.".

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Goladus
I agree, and in fact that's generally the attitude I see. Tools I've seen
used: Matlab, Python, Visual Basic, Java, C++. Often scientists seem as eager
to play with programming as programmers are eager to play with (or at least
read and talk about) research.

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amichail
I 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.

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corentin
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.

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pixcavator
>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.

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corentin
I not am in agree to you.

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pixcavator
>I not am in agree to you.

This is "translated" from English!

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jgamman
i'm a scientist and i think that they/we should learn to program. the problem
is diminishing returns and relevence. e.g. i can spend 100 hours learning how
to say hello world and figure out if something is a prime number OR spend some
time in the lab and maybe write a paper/presentation. i've kept an eye on
programming for a while now but always find myself bored with if/elif but not
able to figure out how to make the leap to the stuff that i want to do - and
then not having the time to dive in fully. catch 22 i guess. would be happy to
comment further if anyone's interested.

