• Question: Do you need to know a lot about programming? What do the programmes do in your work?

    Asked by ZombieBomb to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 16 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Connor Macrae

      Connor Macrae answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      You need to know enough to use aprogram, but in some cases you do need to write things yourself. I use quite a few routines in a program called IDL that carry out very complicated mathematical transformations on data that only needs one line of code to set running, making it very efficient. Yet, sometimes, I’ve had to write my own code – luckily the internet is a brilliant resource for coding, and if you come across a bug you can guarantee someone else has and has posted about it somewhere on the web.

    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      It depends what kind of science you do. Most of what I do is pen-and-paper mathematics, so I don’t use computers very often.

      My quantum mechanics colleagues who do lots of coding use languages like C, Fortran, and Python. They usually use their computer programs to simulate the behaviour of tiny little subatomic particles too small for us to see in real life.

      I’m trying to learn Python at the moment, actually. If you want to learn to code, Python is probably a great place to start.

    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      @ZombieBomb As Steven says, it depends on the type of science. If you are an experimentalist, then you need to be good with your hands, and normally able to run a few bits of software that other people have written. But you get lots of training for that. In my work I only use a computer, but the codes are written by someone else. Occasionally I have to do a bit of fortran, but not much. Other people spend all day coding. The nice thing about science is that it is open-ended. You just do the bits you like as well as you can. Choose projects and areas that suit you with as little or as much programming as you want. What makes a good scientist is hard work, patience and imagination.

    • Photo: Sarah Beasley

      Sarah Beasley answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      I don’t do any programming. Never really enjoyed it! There are people at my company who specialise in software but we usually test stuff rather than actually write code. There’s a huge variety of jobs whether you like programming or not 🙂

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      Most astronomers need to know how to code – I use python in my work, largely because it’s free, has a big user base, and is pretty straightforward to use. With astronomy (at least if you’re using large data sets) the code is usually filtering out data that you want from the stuff you don’t need, and then showing it to you somehow. Since it’s a pretty iterative approach “Hmm, that didn’t show me what I wanted, let’s try this other thing”, we tend to cobble together code in a strange way.

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