Some do, yes. Generally, anything that I’m going to want to make easily accessible to others for use will probably require it. I have lots of ideas I want to implement, but they mostly involve data-mining and machine learning, which would involve applying a routine to large datasets, and I want to be able to build off of others’ work. Basically, implementations of an inference engine.
(One “toy” program I wrote was a program that generates a Markov model of given body of text—i.e., for a given string length, collect all strings in the text of that length and find what characters are likely to come after instances of that text, and then randomly generate a new text from a given string. I know it’s not a new idea, etc., but that was just to get my feet wet. And I was limited to command line and reading in a local file.)
Also, I want to model control systems from an information-theoretic and thermodynamic perspective: what energy flows and entropy generation happen in order to keep a system stable, and perhaps replicate.
Being able to do more work with the brain signals requires more programming knowledge too.
Those things don’t really sound like they require a web interface, but just sharing of your code. I can easily imagine that building a web interface for a technical program involves several non-trivial steps (especially dealing with libraries), because that’s not that common of a combination. I suggest you stick with learning the programming part first and handle the sharing part second. After all, once you have something that works in one language, it’s not usually too difficult to translate it into a different language if something else seems more appropriate.
I personally think that Python works really well for technical computing (or for non-technical computing for that matter). NumPy (the array package) is much better designed than other packages in other languages. It’s also very easy to share your code (PyPi is the standard place to place your package). So toss the django for now.
I enjoy giving advice on this subject, so feel free to ask lots of questions (if you’re interested in the answers anyway).
What are the projects that you want to do that require programming? It sounds like they require a web interface ?
Some do, yes. Generally, anything that I’m going to want to make easily accessible to others for use will probably require it. I have lots of ideas I want to implement, but they mostly involve data-mining and machine learning, which would involve applying a routine to large datasets, and I want to be able to build off of others’ work. Basically, implementations of an inference engine.
(One “toy” program I wrote was a program that generates a Markov model of given body of text—i.e., for a given string length, collect all strings in the text of that length and find what characters are likely to come after instances of that text, and then randomly generate a new text from a given string. I know it’s not a new idea, etc., but that was just to get my feet wet. And I was limited to command line and reading in a local file.)
Also, I want to model control systems from an information-theoretic and thermodynamic perspective: what energy flows and entropy generation happen in order to keep a system stable, and perhaps replicate.
Being able to do more work with the brain signals requires more programming knowledge too.
Those things don’t really sound like they require a web interface, but just sharing of your code. I can easily imagine that building a web interface for a technical program involves several non-trivial steps (especially dealing with libraries), because that’s not that common of a combination. I suggest you stick with learning the programming part first and handle the sharing part second. After all, once you have something that works in one language, it’s not usually too difficult to translate it into a different language if something else seems more appropriate.
I personally think that Python works really well for technical computing (or for non-technical computing for that matter). NumPy (the array package) is much better designed than other packages in other languages. It’s also very easy to share your code (PyPi is the standard place to place your package). So toss the django for now.
I enjoy giving advice on this subject, so feel free to ask lots of questions (if you’re interested in the answers anyway).