Best Practices for Scientific Computing

I reproduce here below principles from the amazing paper Best Practices for Scientific Computing, published on 2012 by a group of US and UK professors. The main purpose of the paper is to “teach”  good programming habits shared from professional developers to people  that weren’t born developer, and became developers just for professional purposes.

Scientists spend an increasing amount of time building and using software. However, most scientists are never taught how to do this efficiently

Best Practices for Scientific Computing

1. Write programs for people, not computers.

   1. a program should not require its readers to hold more than a handful of facts in memory at once
   2. names should be consistent, distinctive and meaningful
   3. code style and formatting should be consistent
   4. all aspects of software development should be broken down into tasks roughly an hour long

2. Automate repetitive tasks.

   1. rely on the computer to repeat tasks
   2. save recent commands in…