[SciPy-User] peer review of scientific software

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 7:18 PM, Paulo Jabardo <pjabardo at yahoo.com.br> wrote:
> I'm an engineer working in research but I spend a good deal of time coding.
> What I've seen with most of my colleagues and friends is that they will only
> code whenever it is extremely necessary for an immediate application in an
> experiment or for their PhD. The problem starts very early, when I was
> beginning my studies, we were taught C (and that is still the case almost 20
> years later). A small percentage of the students (10%?) enjoy programming
> and they will profit. I really loved pointers and doing neat tricks. For the
> rest it was torture, plain and simple torture. And completely useless. Most
> students couldn't do anything useful with programming. All their suffering
> was for nothing. What happened later was obvious: they would avoid
> programming at all costs and if they had to do something they would use
> MS-Excel. The spreadsheets I've seen... I still have nightmares. The things
> they accomplished humbles me, proves that I'm a lower being. I've seen
> people solve partial differential equations where each cell was an element
> in the solution and it was colored according to the result. Beautiful but
> I'd rather suffer accute physical pain than to do something like that, or
> worse, debug  such a "program". By the way, this sort of application was not
> a joke or a neat hack, it was actually the only way those guys knew how to
> solve a problem.
>
> 15 years later... I have a physics undergraduate student working with me.
> Very smart and interested. They still learn C and later on when they need to
> do something, what is it they do? Most professors use Origin. A huge
> improvement over Excel, but still. A couple of months ago, he had to turn in
> a report and since we don't have Origin, he was using Excel. I kind of felt
> sorry for him and I helped him out to do it in Python. He couldn't believe
> it.

Oh - dear; you probably saw this stuff?

http://blog.stodden.net/2013/04/19/what-the-reinhart-rogoff-debacle-really-shows-verifying-empirical-results-needs-to-be-routine/

> I did my Masters and PhD in CFD. Most other students had almost no
> background in programming and did most things using Excel! When they had to
> modify some code, it was almost by accident that things worked. You can
> imagine what sort of code comes out of this. The professors didn't know
> programming much better. Just getting them to understand the concept of
> version control took a while.
>
> In my opinion, If schools taught, at the begining, something like
> Python/Octave/R instead of C, students would be able to use this knowledge
> easily and productively throughout their courses and eventually learn C when
> they really needed it.

That's surely one of the big arguments for Python - it is a great
first language, and it is capable across a wider range than Octave or
R - or even Excel :)

Cheers,

Matthew