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I chat with PHD students at the Swinburne University Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing from tiem to time and they have many similar stories to tell. Th
by hartror 15y ago
I chat with PHD students at the Swinburne University Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing from tiem to time and they have many similar stories to tell. There are pretty sexy problems to deal with as a programmer enough to have me considered abandoning industry and joining the ranks of the professional student.
- TheEzEzz 15y agoAs someone in the opposite position to you (academic coder, considering abandoning academia for industry), I offer up my take: the painful bits of scientific coding are infinitely more painful and numerous than the painful bits of non-scientific coding. I'm kind of a masochistic in that I thoroughly enjoy debugging non-scientific codes (I do indie game dev in my off time), but debugging scientific code makes me want to spoon my eyeballs out one at a time. Debugging normal code is like a puzzle, with interesting hints as to what the problem is. Debugging scientific code is like trying to crack a hash table by hand.