Programming

As a researcher: all the professional software engineers here have no idea about the requirements for code in a research setting.

I recommend you use

• git. It's nice to be able to revert changes without worry.
• descriptive variable names. The meaning of descriptive is highly dependent on your situation. Single letters can have an obvious meaning, but err on the side of longer names if you're unsure. The goal is to be able to look at a variable and instantly know what it represents.
• virtual environments and requirements.txt. when you have your code working you should have pip (or anaconda or whatever) take a snapshot of your current python installation. Then you can install the exact same requirements when you want to revive your code a few months or years down the line. I didn't do that and it's kinda biting me in the ass right now.

I'd say go with Go or Rust. Go is like Python (garbage collection) but compiled. Rust is kind of like C++ but not exactly. It does not have garbage collection or manual memory management but something called "ownership and borrowing". It's as fast as C++ or even faster and has a modern syntax. Though Rust is harder than Go since it is under the hood a systems programming language. If you want something faster than Python, Go is good. I specifically chose Rust over Go since I wanted performance and just wanted to try how it was. I'm still a beginner in Rust but I wrote a few projects at reasonable scale for my level. And also, Rust's error messages are extremely nice. It really lives up to the memes.

To learn Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/learn

To learn Go: https://go.dev/learn/

Can anyone recommend good resources for learning programming

Honestly? No. The best resource is you. Ask questions. Get experience. Ask questions. Get experience. Repeat.

It's not enough to learn. You also have to do. And you really should learn by doing in this field.

First of all - fuck Python. I'm sure it's possible to write good code in that language, but it's not easy and it requires a lot of discipline. I don't mean to be mean to Python, it's a truly wonderful language, arguably one of the best languages, when used properly. But it sounds like you're not using it properly.

Pick a language that:

1. Has static typing
2. Does not do garbage collection

Static typing forces you to have more structure in your code. You can have that structure in a dynamic language but nobody ever does in practice and part of the reason is all of the libraries and third party code you interact assume you have dynamic typing as a crutch to quickly and easily solve hard to solve problems.

It's far better to actually solve those problems, rather than avoid them. You'll tend to create code where bugs are caught when you write the code instead of when someone else executes the code. That "you vs someone else" distinction is a MASSIVE time saver in practice. It took me about 20 years, but I have learned dynamic typing sucks. It's convenient, but it sucks.

For more info: https://hackernoon.com/i-finally-understand-static-vs-dynamic-typing-and-you-will-too-ad0c2bd0acc7

On garbage collection - it's a similar issue. It's really convenient to write code where "someone else" deals with all that memory management "garbage" for you but the reality is you should be thinking about memory when you write your code because, at it's heart, 99.999% of the code you write is in fact just moving memory around. Garbage collection is like "driving" a Tesla with autopilot active. You're not really driving at all. And you can do a better job if you grab that wheel and do it yourself.

I recommend starting with a manually memory managed language (like RUST) to learn how it works, and then from there you might try a language that does most of the work for you without completely taking it out of your hands (for example Swift, which has "automatic" memory management for common situations but it's not a garbage collector and in some edge cases you need to step in and take over... a bit like cruise control in a car if we're going to use that analogy.

It's getting harder these days to find a language that doesn't have garbage collection. The industry has gone decades thinking GC is a good idea and we just need one more fix, which we're working on, to fix that edge case where it fucks up... and then we find another edge case, and another, and another... it's a bit of a mess and entire papers have been written on the subject. But anyway some of the best and newest languages (Rust, Swift, etc) don't have Garbage Collection, which is nice (because writing code in C or Fortran sucks — I'm not recommending that).

That's enough for now. Just keep muddling about learning those languages first before trying to tackle bigger problems. Programming is a difficult task, just like a baby learns to sit up, then roll over, then crawl, then stand, then walk with assistance, then stumble around, then walk, then run, then ride a bicycle with three wheels, then a two wheel one with no pedals, then a bicycle with pedals, then a car after that...

You skipped all those steps and went straight to driving a car (with autopilot). To learn properly, you don't need to go all the way back to "sitting up and crawling", but you should maybe go back just a little bit. Figure out how to get code to run, at all, in a language like rust, get familiar with it.

After you've done that come back here and ask what's next. We can talk about SOLID, Test Driven Development, all the intricacies of project management in git, exceptions vs returning an error vs failing silently, and when to use third party code vs writing your own (phew boy that's a big one...).

But for now - just learn a lower level language. Programming is a bit like physics. You've got elements, and under that atoms, and under that... well I don't even know what's under that (you're the scientist not me). There are "layers" to programming and it's important to work at the right layer and it's also important to understand the layer below and above the one you're working at.

If Python is at layer x, then you really need to learn layer x-1 in order to be good at Python. You don't need to go all the way down - you can't go all the way down (how do magnets work?).