For us, we need researchers who can code. The industry increasingly needs people who can code and script, so sometime soon we will have to create a workforce that does not run away from coding and sees it as natural as using a spread. Excel has been our friend for decades, but it is becoming cumbersome in a world of open-source dataset and machine learning. It is a package that has hardly changed over the years, and still basically remains the same as it did all those years ago.
So how are we going to do this? Setup kids at school with Linux virtual desktops and get then to use vi to edit their code? No. It’s much easier than this. Let’s them use Jupyter Notebooks for their key lessons, and they will start to code naturally. A few lessons on Python as a start, and then integrate it with Maths, Physical, Biology, and anywhere else there is the need to solve things, draw graphs, and, in fact, anything that has tutorial/lab work.
We are all too hung up on teaching software developers the syntax of languages, and forget that coding is for everyone now. For most, it’s a few lines of Python to do the things that they used to do in Excel. It might be to download the latest COVID-19 data and then to chart its progress, or a monitor the statistics on the Web site.
For some reason, we are keeping coding hidden in a lab someone, and forgetting that Python is…
