The Joy of Code

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet. His most famous poem is perhaps, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, written after he came upon a field of daffodils while out walking with his sister Dorothy.

In his writing, Wordsworth was at pains to avoid what was termed, poetic diction, or the use of ‘grandiose, elevated, and unfamiliar language’. Similarly in modern day programming and data science, the ability to write clear, and efficient code is particularly important when working with large data sets.

Python, one of the languages we use routinely at Ixio, is one of the fastest growing programming languages in the world. Some programming languages like Python include a number of mechanisms that help code run more efficiently and quickly. Here are a couple of these for the more technically inclined:

Memoization: an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by storing the results of expensive function calls and returning the cached result when the same inputs occur again. (Memoization is spelled without an 'r')

Generator: Allows for faster and better memory efficiency by returning the next value of a sequence when it is needed, without returning all the values at once

In the world of data science, the ability to write elegant, non—repetitive and functioning code is one way of separating good data scientists from the rest. William Wordsworth would agree.