https://medium.com/@caesoma/on-the-journey-of-learning-computer-programming-as-a-natural-scientist-14e8fbae7781

I am a scientist, in the more old school sense of investigating the natural world, as opposed to computer scientists and maybe mathematicians and statisticians (who in a modern and broader sense are so just as much).We traditionally must spend a lot of time reading about what is known of the systems we are interested in, and are trained in the scientific method to improve our knowledge of the world (without getting into how that works, except that I think anyone who claims to use the method should read Paul Feyerabend). We also need tools to do science, physical ones like the telescope of Galileo then (again, read Feyerabend) and modern microscopes today, as well conceptual ones like mathematics and statistics — which Richard Feynman called a box of tools. More recently it has become important (and sometimes essential) to learn how to use computer programming languages, but while most natural scientists have heard of the existence of computers most are not trained in coding at all.

My personal trajectory started in the physical sciences, later moving on to the life sciences. Having had presumably enough courses in the likes of calculus, linear algebra, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, overall I considered myself a “quantitative” person, but even among the Fortran-coding physicists and chemists I barely got to see enough of that, C or Pascal (maybe like the Occitan of programming) to recognize code when I saw it. Only a few years later, shortly before starting my PhD, I thought I should to actually learn to program stuff, and at that point I basically had to do it from scratch and while I was already getting into some more serious research.This post is not about my path, it is about the process of any given natural scientist — let’s call introducing coding into scientific research, but it is also told from my own perspective and that of friends and colleagues around me, so I assume it differs from that of others.