Introduction to Programming (Python) for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Workshop one of a weekly Programming for the Humanities and Social Sciences series, held at Loughborough University on 2 October 2018.

[nosharwan]

Great Contribution for Humanities and Social Sciences people, thank you

[AlistairBroomhead]

Hi, I stumbled across your course on Twitter, and thought I'd see if it was appropriate for my partner who lectures in a History and Social Sciences department (I am myself a software engineer who uses python).

I'm impressed so far at the level of the course, and plan to look through your later lectures, but had some feedback so far that may be useful for the next time you teach it. I hope this doesn't come across as overly critical, I'm aiming for the level of feedback I'd give to a junior engineer in a code review, or a beginner at a meet-up, and as such aim to be precise rather than discouraging. I'm not sure if this is the best platform, but I'll leave it here:

It may be worth mentioning which version of Python you are using, as there are differences and so it may be helpful to anyone who wants to do further exploration outside of class to avoid this stumbling block.

When talking about types of variable (I get that this is a basic introduction so that's why collections and non-built-in types aren't mentioned) you refer to ints and longs, but there is no differentiation between these in Python 3, while Python 2's arithmetic operations will automatically convert to long when needed, so it's not worth mentioning long; the only time there is a difference in Python 2 is when explicitly casting to an int, which brings me onto my last piece of feedback.

When you mention best practices about creating variables of a certain type, this is actually the opposite, throughout the Python community it's an acknowledged best practice to use bare literals where possible, with int vs float differentiated by use of a decimal point, etc. It may be that what you're recommending is easier to follow for the basics you teach at this point, but that would be a better explanation than chalking it up to best practices, as this can make code harder to read when you get more complex assignments.

Obviously feel free to disagree with or ignore any of this, I'm encouraged to see a public resource of this quality that can help more people make use of the computing power we now have available to us, and simply wish to help if I can.

[prachodaya]

Madam, I have done masters in sociology. What are my options to get into programming which is related to my degree