Hey there!
I’m a chemical physicist who has been using python (as well as matlab and R) for a lot of different tasks over the last ~10 years, mostly for data analysis but also to automate certain tasks. I am almost completely self-taught, and though I have gotten help and tips from professors throughout the completion of my degrees, I have never really been educated in best practices when it comes to coding.
I have some friends who work as developers but have a similar academic background as I do, and through them I have become painfully aware of how bad my code is. When I write code, it simply needs to do the thing, conventions be damned. I do try to read up on the “right” way to do things, but the holes in my knowledge become pretty apparent pretty quickly.
For example, I have never written a class and I wouldn’t know why or where to start (something to do with the init method, right?). I mostly just write functions and scripts that perform the tasks that I need, plus some work with jupyter notebooks from time to time. I only recently got started with git and uploading my projects to github, just as a way to try to teach myself the workflow.
So, I would like to learn to be better. Can anyone recommend good resources for learning programming, but perhaps that are aimed at people who already know a language? It’d be nice to find a guide that assumes you already know more than a beginner. Any help would be appreciated.
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/
Why not just stick with Python until there’s a need to learn something else?
No.
I have written rust for my research (one does not simply calculate 4 million data points in python), but just no.
My main code is still python, because it’s just so much nicer to write and iterate on.
Rust syntax is way closer to Python than go. Go’s syntax is awful imo. It’s like objective C
Okay, my bad. Go’s syntax sucks now that I take another look at it compared to Rust’s.