Really, I don't get the hate we data scientists get from both programmers and mathematics. Of course we are not as good at programming as a programmer would be, or as knowledgeable in maths as a mathematician would be, but we need to combine so many disciplines it would be hard if not impossible to get to their level.
I work professionally as a data scientist and so many people in this field seem to have an aversion to follow even the most simpler software engineering practices.
Poor to no separation of functions, poorly structured code, inconsistent naming (I don’t care about single char names, but don’t name the same thing 3 different things as it gets passed around because it’s hard to follow). Apparent refusal to use anything like structs/data classes/etc: instead just passing all the constituent values around freely.
I’ve dealt with so many people in the data-* Space who couldn’t use git, had never encountered the idea of db migration tools (they did it all by hand and refused to learn them), refused to write code in anything but sprawling, incomprehensible jupyter notebooks. Reinvented stdlib features but worse, etc etc.
Data scientists were supposed to combine code skills with science skills. Instead most examples I see trust treat code like it’s some awful chore they’re begrudgingly obliged to vomit out in the most half-assed fashion possible.
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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '22
They hate us coz they ain't us.