1.
The Two
Cultures
Joshua Ballanco, Ph.D.
‸ of
Programming

2.
Are you:
✔ a Scientist
✔ a Programmer
✔ tired from all the Linear Algebra

3.
Background
• 1991 – Learn to program (age 11)
• 1996 – Recompile Linux kernel
• 1998 – Do something with Linux other than recompile a kernel
• 2002 – B.S. in Chemistry
• 2008 – Server Software Engineer at Apple
• 2012 – Ph.D. in Chemical Biology
• 2013 – Software Engineering Consultant
• 2014 – Discover Julia

4.
Background
Science Programming

5.
What’s this about?
Thesis
“A good scientific programming language
will also be a good general purpose
programming language.”

6.
What’s this about?
Question
Do scientists and programmers
program differently?

7.
History
1959

8.
History
• The Two Cultures
• Science
• Humanities

9.
History
• English perspective
• Humanities look down on the sciences…
• But humanities could benefit from scientific
method

10.
History
• American perspective
• Scientists reject need for study of humanities…
• But scientists could benefit from improved
communication skills

11.
History
• Humanities – Understand humans and our
interaction with the world
• Sciences – Discover the immutable laws that
govern nature
• Both – Seek to increase the wealth of human
knowledge

12.
Scientists vs Programmers
• Tooling
• Version Control
• Editors/IDEs
• Debuggers
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/13/048744

13.
Scientists vs Programmers
• Code Organization
Rails CellProfiler
SLOC: 209114 SLOC: 147512

14.
Scientists vs Programmers
• Priorities
“Yet we should not pass up our
opportunities in that critical 3%.”
“We should forget about small efficiencies,
say about 97% of the time: premature
optimization is the root of all evil.”
– Donald Knuth

15.
Programmers = Humanities?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LfmrkyP81M

16.
Programmers = Humanities?
https://www.dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html

17.
The Two Cultures
• Scientists – Programming is a tool to generate
interesting results
• Programmers – Software is an artifact that should
be crafted with care
• Both – Make the computer do stuff!

18.
Why do I care?
0
700
1400
2100
2800
3500
NumPy SciPy Rails
1000x Lines of Code Contributors

19.
Why do I care?

20.
Why do I care?
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21695377-professors-
unprofessional-programs-have-created-new-profession-more

21.
Why do I care?
Julia can be the language that
unifies science and programming

22.
How?
• Pkg.generate()
• Readability
• Array indexing
• Testing
• REPL

23.
How?
• Pkg.generate()
• Brilliant!
• Embraces the importance of community
• What about Project.generate()?

24.
How?
• Readability
• Unicode operators? Brilliant…sometimes!
• “Any fool can write code that a computer can
understand. Good programmers write code that
humans can understand.” – Martin Fowler

25.
How?
• Array indexing
• Arbitrary indexing? Brilliant!
• “1-based indexing…eww!”
• “I don't know how many of you have ever met
Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in
computer science is measured in nano-
Dijkstras.” – Alan Kay

26.
How?
• Testing
• Julia: @test, @test_throws
• Ruby:

27.
How?
• REPL
• Shell? Help? C++?!? Brilliant!
• REPL as exploration vs REPL as dev tool
• workspace()? Brilliant!
• method redefinition… boo! (Infamous #265)

28.
How?
You!

29.
Joshua Ballanco
jballanc@gmail.com
https://github.com/jballanc
@manhattanmetric
Thank You!