The Software Sustainability Institute was invited to participate in a workshop on Effective Scientific Programming at the University of Newcastle on Monday 20th June 2011. Funded by the Vitae Yorkshire and North East Hub, the workshop was run by a team of researchers from Newcastle University and Northumbria University. The workshop allowed scientists to come together and share their experiences of programming and gain a greater awareness of tools and techniques that can help them become more effective programmers.

Over 70 scientists from universities across the North East attended. Attendees varied both in their experience of programming and the languages they used. MATLAB was the most popular, followed by FORTRAN, C/C++, R and Python, and there were also a handful of users each of Java, Visual Basic, SQL, Smalltalk and hardware definition languages.

At the outset, the workshop provided an introduction to networking, social not computer, and attendees were encouraged to practice this throughout the day. There followed sessions on how to choose programming languages, version control, visualisation packages, SQL and database programming, distributed programming, the problem of numbers, precision and rounding, and open-source copyright and licencing. The Institute's James Perry and Mike Jackson presented talks on software libraries, GPUs and why software testing is necessary as well as chairing discussions on the importance of reproducible results and what makes good code good.

The Software Sustainability would like to thank Elizabeth Petrie of Newcastle University for inviting us to attend an interesting and engaging day and allowing us the opportunity to hear first-hand the challenges, concerns and interests of scientists writing software.