New Year’s Resolution: Learn How to Code by Stephen Turner
From the post:
Q&A sites for biologists are littered with questions from researchers asking for non-technical, code-free ways of doing a particular analysis. Your friendly bioinformatics or computational biology neighbor can often point to a resource or design a solution that can get you 90% of the way, but usually won’t grok the biological problem as truly as you do. By learning even the smallest bit of programming, you can at least be equipped with the knowledge of what is programmatically possible, and collaborations with your bioinformatician can be more fruitful. As every field of biological research becomes more computational in nature, learning how to code is becoming more important than ever. (emphasis added)
The line “…usually won’t grok the biological problem as truly as you do….” is the key to the article, but you will find a number of excellent resources cited further down in it.
I say that because programmers are going to code to the implicit subjects that they recognize and understand as important for the program. Nothing wrong with that and it would be quite odd if they didn’t. The problem is those may not represent your understanding of what you want to accomplish, including the subjects that you think are important to be recognized.
Yes, programs consist of subjects, even though we don’t normally use topic maps syntax to identify them. Nor should we if we want acceptable running times. What we can do is be sure that the subjects that are important to us, perhaps identified by a topic map in the planning stages for a project, are represented in the acceptable inputs and results from a program. Knowing how to program or even read code a bit, will help you achieve that goal.