general thoughts

[Alistair Campbell]

Hi,

I am a bit in the same position ben. I am a psychologist by profession but I
have always been interested in programming. But, there is no way I would do
it as a job. I think doing it for other people would be too full on for me.

I get my inspiration for things to program from my other interests. So, I am
in the middle of producing a computerised assessment of executive brain
function. Next I want to write a program that enables me to develop and
administer questionnaires, surveys, and semi-structured interviews on a PC
(even TCP/IP!) and link it back to a central clinical information database.
Then I would like to write a small statitistics program that enables users
to compute clinical significance of change pre and post treatment. I would
also like to expand this to more of a suite of obscure statitics tools in
the social sciences. I also have a project in mind to write a program that
does a thing called repertory grids.

All in all these are areas of psychology that I have an interest in anyway
and the idea of programming aspects of them simply comes because I have the
programming as a tool. If I were you I'd stick to programming in your other
domain of knowledge first so that you're not having to learn the language
and the knowledge at the same time. If you have the knowledge it is then
technical thing about how to automate the process as efficiently and as
elegantly as possible.

All the best.

Alistair