Hey there!
I’m a chemical physicist who has been using python (as well as matlab and R) for a lot of different tasks over the last ~10 years, mostly for data analysis but also to automate certain tasks. I am almost completely self-taught, and though I have gotten help and tips from professors throughout the completion of my degrees, I have never really been educated in best practices when it comes to coding.
I have some friends who work as developers but have a similar academic background as I do, and through them I have become painfully aware of how bad my code is. When I write code, it simply needs to do the thing, conventions be damned. I do try to read up on the “right” way to do things, but the holes in my knowledge become pretty apparent pretty quickly.
For example, I have never written a class and I wouldn’t know why or where to start (something to do with the init method, right?). I mostly just write functions and scripts that perform the tasks that I need, plus some work with jupyter notebooks from time to time. I only recently got started with git and uploading my projects to github, just as a way to try to teach myself the workflow.
So, I would like to learn to be better. Can anyone recommend good resources for learning programming, but perhaps that are aimed at people who already know a language? It’d be nice to find a guide that assumes you already know more than a beginner. Any help would be appreciated.
As one physicist to another, the most important thing in the code are long variable names (descriptive) and comments.
We usually do not do multi-people multi year projects, so all other comments in this page especially the ones coming from programmers are not that relevant. Classes are cool, but they are not needed and often obscure clarity of algorithmic/functional programming.
S. Wolfram (creator of Mathematica) said something along these lines (paraphrasing) if you are writing real code in Mathematica - you are doing something wrong.
Seriously - why not?
Say you’re doing an experiment, wouldn’t it be nice if someone else could repeat that experiment? Maybe in 3 years? in 30 years? in 3,000 years time? And maybe they could use your code instead of writing it themselves and possibly getting it wrong?
If something is worth doing, then it is worth doing properly.
I write code all day professionally. A lot of my code doesn’t use classes. I agree they often “obscure clarity”.
But sometimes they do the opposite - they make things crystal clear. It’s important to know how to use classes and even more important to know when to use them. I guarantee some of the work you do could benefit from a few simple classes. They don’t need to be complex - I wrote a class the earlier today that is only four lines of code. And yes, a class was apropriate.