[tpm] Misdirected effort

Tom Legrady legrady at gmail.com
Mon May 7 17:40:18 PDT 2012


I found the software carpentry site a couple of years ago .. read through
the whole thing. I found it very interesting.

The focus is on scientists who are presumed to be intelligent and  have
good math backgrounds, but never learned to write good software. I remember
a discussion of the idea that data files should store their provenance, to
use the art world term: store a history of where it originated and when,
and of every transformation it has undergone, including version numbers for
the software.  When there was the scandal with the stolen emails from the
UK university, there was a problem because data presented in papers could
not be verified; either the original   data was gone, or some or al of the
programs used to process it were no longer usable.

On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 3:50 PM, <arocker at vex.net> wrote:

>
> An article in May's "Linux Journal" mentions a site called "Software
> Carpentry" http://software-carpentry.org/about/ninety-second-pitch/ which
> aims to teach scientists how to program.
>
> A noble aim, but they spoil it by picking Python as the language of
> instruction. How can we show them the error of their ways, apart from
> referencing the role of Perl in bioinformatics?
>
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