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Counterexample here, I started working with William Stein in 2006, contributing to Sage Math. As a math student, I actually learned these skills (including sou
by boothby 6y ago
Counterexample here, I started working with William Stein in 2006, contributing to Sage Math. As a math student, I actually learned these skills (including source control, unit testing, peer review, etc in addition to high-performance algorithms) as an undergrad and continued to sharpen them through my grad career. True, I was seen as an oddity, but my skills were valued by colleagues and I took every opportunity I could to teach in computational summer programs.
- mhh__ 6y agoYou raise an important point. These skills are very important, but they are barely raised when we teach scientists how to copy and paste python snippets. In a British university it's even harder to acquire these skills because the course is often set in stone (e.g. I wrote my first - not very good! - compiler several years ago now but I still have to take Introduction to Python in effect twice) When I was 15/16, I was very lucky to have a computing teacher who - although he didn't teach us much actual programming - absolutely drilled into us the importance of a program's quality and aims. The absolute basics go a very long way: Should this function be smaller, is this logic simple etc.