People say that learning to code is a very useful skill. What does it mean exactly?
I can do data analysis and visualization in python and R. Does that mean I can code? Or does coding mean full stack developers?
Is coding a general umbrella term for all types of programming (including excel)?
In: Technology
There is a big difference between programming and coding, but coding is a prerequisite for programming. You are coding, but you are not a software developer. So yes, you can reasonably say you ‘can code’ but you should always have the caveat ready that you are not a software developer.
I think I know the gist of your work, I got a degree in data analytics so we learned how to use Jupyter notebooks to put blocks of Python or R to run against data and get visualizations. That is *absolutely* coding. You have some data, you use python to sort through it; you might use Pandas to analyze the data and matplotlib to visualize the data. If that isn’t coding…
So why aren’t you a developer? You can pull methods from classes, which is what you are doing if you use matplotlib even if you weren’t aware of it, shouldn’t that count? Well, not really, because a true developer is the guy that wrote the Pandas class/library.
This isn’t to denigrate your skills and abilities, it is just a different application of the coding skill. A typical programmer, who we should really call a software developer because technically configuring anything with an OS with specific functions (like when I used to configure switches and routers) is ‘programming’, is building software tools with his/her coding skills. They might be ‘full stack’ or ‘half stack’ or whatever.
Latest Answers