Rise of the Scientific Programmer
The other night I was searching for Python science books and stumbled across this one titled "Python for Biologists: A complete programming course for beginners"...the homepage for the book is here: <a href="http://pythonforbiologists.com/index.php/introduction-to-python-for-biologists/" rel="nofollow">http://pythonforbiologists.com/index.php/introduction-to-pyt...</a><p>Admittedly, it only has two reviews on Amazon, but they're both five stars, and they both seem to come from biologists who are apparently thrilled at being able to leverage code for their work...the funny thing is, the book itself is not "advanced" as far as what most professional programmers would consider "advanced"...the Beginners' book ends with "Files, programs, and user input" and the Advanced book ends with Comprehensions and Exceptions...<p>I think we as programmers vastly understimate how useful even basic programming would be to virtually anyone today. I work at Stanford and it continually astounds me when I run into non-programmers who are otherwise doing data-intensive research, who fail to see how their incredibly repetitive task could be digitized and implemented as a for-loop. It's not that they are <i>dumb</i>, it's that they've never been exposed to the opportunity. And conversely, it's not because I'm smart, but I literally can't remember what it was like <i>not</i> to break things down into computable patterns. And I've been the better for it (especially because I'm generally able to recognize when things <i>aren't</i> easy patterns)<p>Sometime ago, I believe it was Stephen Hawking who speculated that the realm of human knowledge was becoming so vast that genetic engineering of intelligence might be required to continue our progression...that may be so, but I wonder if we could achieve the same growth in capacity of intellect by teaching more computational thinking (and implementation), as we do with general literacy and math. As Garry Kasparov said, "We might not be able to change our hardware, but we can definitely upgrade our software."<p><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-che...</a>