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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I broadly agree except for the part about women (I actually have known a lot of women who were great software developers, although I agree that women seem proportionaly less likely to get good at it) and had a similar background: I started in CS where I remained for two years (taking all of the CS classes before stopping after data structures in C) before changing my focus to a physical science. I now work in a job where I am essentially a data scientist for a group of (much smarter) physicists all of whom can program with the kind of intuitive knowledge that you described. All of these people (whom have been perfectly willing to self teach themselves other things in math and physics) are hugely constrained by the fact that they don’t know really know how data structures work. If they ever bother to learn Ill be out of a job.

I have asked some of my colleagues how they learned to program. The older ones are all completely self taught (and are usually a little better since this means that they had to learn C or Fortran) while the people my age usually got some sort of CS for physical scientists (which is usually a 1 semester long class in python where they learned to use numpy and matplotlib). I really don’t understand why more of them haven’t self taught and have concluded that it must be a matter of motivation or maybe even professional chauvinism.

Lots of scientists fundamentally don’t believe that things which happen on a computers are or could be that interesting. This is just insane to me given that computers are finally getting powerful enough that they can run some of their experiments with simulations (or at least use simulations to better plan them). Given the importance of these skills I really believe that universities should require physical scientists to spend a year taking real computer science, or whatever else it takes to make more of the profession aware that these skills are becoming as important as competence in mathematics for doing original research these days.

This is just insane to me given that computers are finally getting powerful enough that they can run some of their experiments with simulations (or at least use simulations to better plan them)

This has been true for a while though. Computing in general, whether it be by simulation or code for a tool or just for analyzing large amounts of data, have taken over or created many subfields in the hard sciences.

I agree and I should have clarified that I specifically meant High Performance Computing which is where knowledge of things like parallel programming is essential.

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