A Sense Of Rigour

One of the things I learned whilst working on my Ph.D. was a sense of rigour. My advisor: Professor John Tucker fought long and hard with me to curb my sloppy ways and instill a deep seated sense of precision and rigour in my thesis and code. This was not an easy task but I believe it was the single most important lesson I learned during my Ph.D.

Nothing frustrates me more than when I see sloppy code or practices. If you have a set of coding standards for testing, documentation, naming conventions, and even layout – use them. If you don’t, then maybe you should get some.

One of the reasons I am drawn to Python for my next major project is that the language has a very clean semantics and when you write using Python it just flows very naturally. The precise indentation requirements make even the layout of code always look consistent. Also, with facilities like doctest it becomes possible to combine the code, with the documentation and testing in a very clean and precise bundle. One can certainly not accuse Perl or even “C” of being rigourous.

No one would ever say John Tucker was a great coder, but he certainly helped me write better code and design stronger systems that have lasted for years. I think a big reason for this is the sense of rigour he instilled in my over twenty years ago. Thanks John!