Programming

17312 readers

301 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

Any tips to help a scientist become a better programmer? (iusearchlinux.fyi)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

70 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey there!

I'm a chemical physicist who has been using python (as well as matlab and R) for a lot of different tasks over the last ~10 years, mostly for data analysis but also to automate certain tasks. I am almost completely self-taught, and though I have gotten help and tips from professors throughout the completion of my degrees, I have never really been educated in best practices when it comes to coding.

I have some friends who work as developers but have a similar academic background as I do, and through them I have become painfully aware of how bad my code is. When I write code, it simply needs to do the thing, conventions be damned. I do try to read up on the "right" way to do things, but the holes in my knowledge become pretty apparent pretty quickly.

For example, I have never written a class and I wouldn't know why or where to start (something to do with the init method, right?). I mostly just write functions and scripts that perform the tasks that I need, plus some work with jupyter notebooks from time to time. I only recently got started with git and uploading my projects to github, just as a way to try to teach myself the workflow.

So, I would like to learn to be better. Can anyone recommend good resources for learning programming, but perhaps that are aimed at people who already know a language? It'd be nice to find a guide that assumes you already know more than a beginner. Any help would be appreciated.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Learn Haskell.

Since it is a research language, it is packed with academically-rigorous implementations of advanced features (currying, lambda expressions, pattern matching, list comprehension, type classes/type polymorphism, monads, laziness, strong typing, algebraic data types, parser combinators that allow you to implement a DSL in 20 lines, making illegal states unrepresentable, etc) that eventually make their way into other languages. It will force you to learn some of the more advanced concepts in programming while also giving you a new perspective that will improve your code in any language you might use.

I was big into embedded C programming years back ... and when I got to the pointers part, I couldn't figure out why I suddenly felt unsatisfied and that I was somehow doing something wrong. That instinct ended up being at least partially correct. I sensed that I was doing something unsafe (which forced me to be very careful around footguns like pointers, dedicating extra mental processes to keep track of those inherently unsafe solutions) and I wished there was some more elegant way around unsafe actions like that (or at least some language provided way of making sure those unintended side effects could be enforced by the compiler, which would prevent these kinds of bugs from getting into my code).

Years later, after not enjoying JS, TS (IMO, a porous condom over the tip of JavaScript), Swift, Python, and others, my journey brought me to FRP which eventually brought me to FP and with it, Haskell, Purescript, Rust, and Nix. I now regularly feel the same satisfaction using those languages that I felt when solving a math problem correctly. Refactoring is a pleasure with strictly typed languages like that because the compiler catches almost everything before it will even let you compile.