• Question: how do you code things??

    Asked by 966K47 to Joanne, Chris on 15 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Chris Werner

      Chris Werner answered on 15 Nov 2017:


      The easiest way to code is in Linux bash. There are a number of operating systems, Windows, Mac and the other one is Linux. In the former two, you have a Desktop, and everything looks nice and graphic. On a supercomputer which uses Linux, you have to open things using a command line. If I wanted to navigate to a file in Windows, I physically look for it. In Linux, you have to direct your computer to where it is.

      For example, a simple code to find a document somewhere is;

      ###
      cd /Users/username/Documents/My Files/New Document.doc
      ###

      Very painstaking at the start but I hardly even notice it now as its so second nature! You can also code and run programs in different languages, such as Java, C, C++, Fortran, R, Python, iPython, and so on. Different coding languages is similar to different dialects. Bit like Spanish and Catalan, same base language but slightly different.

      Hope that answers your question to some extent, there’s gigabytes of information out there to answer that question, depends what you want to code. The main thing one needs to know about coding is that not everyone is fluent in it, there’s always websites there that can help you out if you get stuck as someone else has probably tried to do the same that you have!

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