Programming

17513 readers

243 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 8 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] 3 points 8 months ago

Learning new programming languages is an awesome way to expand your programming brain. If you want to stay in the same scientific computation niche, you can check out Julia or Mathematica. If you’re just looking to broaden your horizons, the world is your oyster. For me, learning Clojure really cooked my noodle but made me a much better programmer since it taught me functional programming.

Also, just read other peoples code! You can learn the conventions that way. Though for you it would best to find other products within your niche, because I’m not sure if general web dev code would be super helpful.

There are techniques that are broader than any single language’s conventions, and I think learning those are how you can improve. That’s hard to teach, though, and it comes from experience with a few different languages, in my opinion.

And honestly, I can totally respect the “conventions be damned” attitude, because at the end of the day, you’re trying to make something that works, and if nobody else is reading that code, you’ve made the right trade-off.