Communications of the ACM

Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we’ll publish selected posts or excerpts.

DOI: 10.1145/2507771.2507775 http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm

tists and engineers. Here is my value
proposition to them:
If you are a scientist or engineer, pro-
gramming can enable you to work 10 to
100 times faster, and to come up with
more creative solutions than colleagues
who do not know how to program.

Kevin’s story

Modern-day scientists and engineers are spending more and more of their workdays in front of the computer. As an example, consider my friend Kevin, who works in oceanography and mechanical engineering. Whoa, sounds like he is probably spending all day out on high-tech boats, rigging together mechanical devices like MacGyver and collecting data from underwater sensors, right? This must be his typical workday — hard hats and heavy-duty work gloves.

Actually, Kevin spends less than 5% of his time out on the ocean; the other 95% of the time, he is sitting in front of the computer writing programs to clean up, transform, process, and extract insights from data collected out in the field.

The same story plays out for scien-
tists and engineers in all sorts of fields:
astronomers, biologists, physicists,
aerospace engineers, economists, ge-
neticists, ecologists, environmental en-
gineers, neuroscientists…the list goes
on and on. Modern-day science and en-
gineering is all about processing, analyz-
ing, and extracting insights from data.

three Reasons to Learn

Over the past few years, many scientists and engineers have ranted to me about how furious they are that nobody made them learn programming back in high school or college. They now realize how much more productive they could be at work if they had developed those skills earlier.

Based on these conversations, I’ve come up with three reasons why scientists and engineers must learn programming:

1. You can work 10 times faster by writing computer programs to automate tedious tasks (such as data cleaning and integration) that you would otherwise need to do by hand. If you know how to program, computer-related tasks that used to take you a week to finish will now take only a few hours. I cannot think of any other skill that leads to an instant 10-times productivity boost for scientists and engineers.

2. Programming allows you to discover more creative solutions than your colleagues who do not know how to program. It lets you go beyond simply using the tools and datasets that everyone else around you uses, to transcend the limitations that your peers are stuck with. For example, you will be able to write programs to automati-

Philip Guo
Why scientists and
engineers must Learn
Programming
http://cacm.acm.org/
blogs/blog-cacm/166115-
why-scientists-and-engineers-must-
learn-programming/fulltext
July 18, 2013

In recent years, there has been an admirable push to get more people to learn programming. But if I have never been exposed to programming, why should I invest all of the effort to learn?

What is in it for me?

Pundits often give fuzzy responses, like claiming that programming is the “literacy of the 21st century,” that it helps you become a more empowered citizen, and that it enables you to create magical works of pure creativity.

Even though I agree with many of those claims, I am not convinced that they are concrete enough to motivate someone to devote the thousands of hours necessary to get proficient at programming.