>>12685533>As a biology student the only programing thats in the mandatory courses is a bit of R. I figured getting a better feel for programing migtht be usefull. Is it worth the effort anons? Is C a good language to learn?No
C is wonderful language, but far from your field
Python is hands-down the language you should learn if you are anywhere near the vicinity of biology or biological problems. I say this because I'm an industry post-doc, cell bio PhD and work in ML in the chemistry space, and I have not come across a single new paper in the field that didn't use python. The newest ML models are always built with tensorflow or pytorch (strangely, the chemistry space has adapted pytorch for like 80% of new stuff).
I used R throughout my entire grad school career and its my favorite language, fucking phenomenal statistics and plotting. If nothing else, learn how to reorganize data in R, perform statistics, and PLOT. ggplot2 is the best plotting/figure making package available in any language, hands-down. Seaborn comes close-ish, but I don't like the way python implements plotting as well. Even though I use python for all my of work now because tensorflow, I still do most of my data curation/exploration in R and export data to R to graph.
Python is the best scientific general-purpose language, hands-down. Get your favorite IDE (Pycharm if you are starting out and dunno what to start with), anaconda, and go at it (I do hate the bloat of anaconda, but almost all of the packages I need are in it + conda is great for environment management).
Seriously, C or whatever can be learned later for your specialization. Python if you want to learn a general language that you will encounter often in the field, and its so goddamn easy to pick up a second language if you need to (I went basic ->java -> javascript(lol) -> R (not a real langauge, scripting like javascript) -> Python, and I learned python in like 3 weeks during a few hours off-time here and there at work.
