Programming and science education
May 29, 2008
From a discussion on /.
There is even a bizarre camp that actually acknowledges the need for computer programming, but turns my ‘any language’ argument on its head to advocate the students do ’scientific programming’ using Excel because it is ‘easy,’ ubiquitous, and students are familiar with it. They argue Excel is ’surprisingly powerful’ with flow control and allows you to focus on the science rather than syntax.
As a computational scientist (and with both a physical and a life science background), that such arguments still happen is appalling. IMO, all scientists, especially those remotely connected to theory and/or computational science should be given the opportunity to learn some formal software engineering and computer science principles (for physical chemists, bioinformaticians, etc is should be mandatory to do some courses). Everything I know, which is not much, is self taught. It’s the princples and practices that are important, not the specifics. Have seen way too much noodly, unmaintainable code and bad hacks over the years (including my own).
Perhaps things have changed, but apparently not that much, and given attitudes towards software engineering in academia, I seriously doubt it.
Technorati Tags: Software Engineering, Programming, Science, Education
Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Education, Science, Software & Internet
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June 5, 2008 at 10:56 pm
[...] few days ago, bbgm wrote about Programming and Science Education and how people advocating that students use Excel (or ...