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| Programming for ScientistsSoftware development wisdom and common-sense for the scientist-programmer |
Photo by Gaetan Lee
Even the most genius programmer has bad days. But have you ever stopped to consider how much of a better programmer you’d be if you had as many good days as possible? We think it’s not so much about how great you are on your best day; it’s about bringing your A-game to the project each and every day. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by blmurch
(with thanks to Joe Z for the comment that inspired this post )
Feature-creep can be a real killer for your carefully crafted code. Scientific code can be especially prone to it, simply because planning is hard when you’re working on the edge of human knowledge. This article explores the topic in a bit more detail. Read the rest of this entry »
For decades computers have got faster by increasing the power of a single processing unit but recently chip makers are hitting limits, mainly cost and heat. The results: instead of one processor getting faster, more are being added. At the same time the advent of cheap commodity computers and fast networking has given rise to various clusters, grids and clouds. This article gives a quick overview of what is available when you need lots and lots of power but don’t have lots and lots of money.
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Photo by dullhunk
You do test your code, right?
Well? We certainly hope so.
Testing can be a pain. But it should also be a habit. And we think it’s pretty uncontroversial to say that testing your code is a Good Thing. The Scientist-Programmer often finds a tension between allocating effort to testing their code and effort to getting on with the science, but not only would skimping on testing be a mistake, but (if you write them correctly) the tests themselves can have scientific value. Read the rest of this entry »
Java is a object oriented language developed by Sun Microsystems. It was designed from scratch to be simple, secure and platform independent. It has a large and active community and recently most of the code has been made open source. This post looks covers the basics of Java as well as its suitability for use in scientific programming.
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