Opinion: What's with the lack of coding standards in Data Science?

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few years working through data science and AI topics. One thing that’s struck me consistently is the total lack of reasonable coding standards in almost all the sample code that I see.

I was doing an AI lab in eDX recently, and one of the questions got me to open some sample Python code for a virtual environment, and asked me to work out how the virtual world that it created operated.

After working on it for quite a while, I realized that the #1 reason I was finding it hard, was not because the concepts were crazy difficult, it was because the person writing the sample thought it was reasonable to have variables, arrays, etc. with names like r, x, np, d, and so on.

What’s with that?

Suddenly it felt like I was reading code written by a self-taught programmer in 1970, at their first attempt at using Basic. There is absolutely no need for anyone to be doing this.

Please don’t.

I was left wondering who on earth would write this and interestingly enough, found that the person who translated the environments was in fact self-taught. I admire his efforts in teaching himself but this is not acceptable code to be sharing with anyone else.

There is no reason for data science or AI code in Python, R, or whatever language to be written like this. (Yet I see it all the time)

2018-10-02