Hi Titus, I have a couple of questions about your mail. 2016-03-25 14:52 GMT+01:00 C. Titus Brown <[email protected]>: > My usual response to the question of "what programming language should I > learn?" is: > > * Python or R, because those are the two languages being used by many > computational scientists, being actively developed, and with rich > existing ecosystems of libraries and tutorials; >
Don't you think that specifying something may lead the trainee to think "I should know that" or "Those are the only ones worth considering"? In a way, this may be equivalent to "To solve every problem, you *just* use language X". > * choose between them based on your local friendly help - if you have > a lot of R folk down the hall, learn R, and vice versa; This is true, but how often someone does not ask because "I'm the only one not knowing that. Everyone else knows then I should know too"? How often a community moves from helpful to menacing? > > * once you know one, you can pick up another language much more easily than > you might believe; Agree. Best, Giuseppe _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
