Archive for the ‘tools’ Category
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
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Lots of scientists write bits of software to get things done. Sometimes they offer to give someone else (a collaborator, student, postdoc etc) a copy of some of their code, to help that person out. Sometimes a given piece of code is useful enough ...
Posted in Craft of coding, tools | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
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In a previous post we talked about how to keep your brain in tip top condition and staying in the 'zone'. We recommended some simple techniques like removing distracting email, IM or twitter traffic but sometimes the problem isn't staying in the zone, it's getting ...
Posted in Craft of coding, tools | 4 Comments »
Monday, May 11th, 2009
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Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator, or SWIG for short, is a tool that provides a way to interface C/C++ with a variety of high level programming languages (notably Python, R but not Matlab - which has it's own way of linking to C). It ...
Posted in More advanced topics, The basics of..., tools | 2 Comments »
Monday, February 16th, 2009
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All programmers need some way of getting the code from their head into the computer. Nowadays, this means a development environment or text editor of some sort. There are a range of these available for different platforms and languages and many of these are ...
Posted in The basics of..., tools | 4 Comments »
Monday, November 17th, 2008
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It's important to know the basic features of any language you're programming in. We don't just mean the syntax or whether the language is dynamically or statically typed (although these are very important); you also need to know what the language is good for, ...
Posted in Choosing a programming language, The basics of..., tools | 8 Comments »