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Then, fortran or numpy programmers who can only conceive a single type of data (the multi-dimensional array of floats), are not doing science? I disagree.
by enriquto 7y ago
Then, fortran or numpy programmers who can only conceive a single type of data (the multi-dimensional array of floats), are not doing science? I disagree.
- 91edec 7y agoI prefer to call them guild navigators.
- enriquto 7y agoMaybe they are not doing programming, and they are certainly not doing engineering, but they are definitely doing science!
- shepherdjerred 7y agoWhat's the spice in this analogy
- thesuperbigfrog 7y agoCaffeine. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the brew of arabica that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains, stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
- Arrrlex 7y agoThis isn't a reply to your substantive point (of course I agree that fortran/numpy programmers do science), but certainly when I'm coding with numpy I have a mental model of the shapes of the arrays, very akin to the mental model I have of the types of objects in e.g. Haskell or Python. Sure, the shapes are runtime properties and they're not enforced anywhere, but that doesn't matter to my mental model of what's going on.
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoWhether or not you're doing science doesn't depend on which software tools you use, it depends on whether you're advancing the frontier of human knowledge. If you're producing publishable scientific research, you're doing science. If you aren't, you're probably not doing science. I don't think the article is saying otherwise, it's just highlighting a similarity between what type systems do, and the sort of reasoning we associate with science.