On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 03:33:55PM +0100, Giuseppe Profiti wrote: > 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".
I'm not sure I understand what you mean -- are you worried that by specifying Python and R I'm narrowing the conversation too quickly? For beginners, I think it's more helpful to specify a few languages (that they've all heard of, AFAICT) than to launch into more complicated discussions. > > * 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? Here are you worried that they will think that if people down the hall already know it, they are stupid for not knowing it? This is never a problem in biology, where most people are not computationally literate in any serious way. cheers, --titus _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
