Recent posts
On HDF5 and the future of data management
Yesterday a blog post by Cyrille Rossant entitled "Moving away from HDF5" caught my eye. My own tendency at the moment is to use HDF5 more and more, so I was interested in why someone else would want to do the opposite. Here is my conclusion after reading his post, plus some ideas about where scientific data management is or should be heading in my opinion.
From facts to narratives
A recurrent theme in computational science (and elsewhere) is the need to combine machine-readable information (which in the following I will call "facts" for simplicity) with a narrative for the benefit of human readers. The most obvious situation is a scientific publication, which is essentially a narrative explaining the context and motivation for a study, the work that was undertaken, the results that were observed, and conclusions drawn from these results. For a scientific study that made use of computation (which is almost all of today's research work), the narrative refers to various computational facts, in particular machine-readable input data, program code, and computed results.
This blog is moving!
The reason for the move is that the user interface at WordPress is changing all the time without ever getting better. I like to write my posts on my own computer using Emacs, rather than typing into a rudimentary editing window on a Web site. This is not completely impossible with WordPress, but more hassle than it's worth.
My new blog is hosted on GitHub and powered by Frog, a static Web site generator that mixes my posts written as plain Markdown files with HTML templates based on the Bootstrap framework to produce the pages you can read. This setup gives me much more control over my blog, while at the same time making it easier for me to publish new posts.
The one feature that will disappear is the possibility to subscribe to my blog in order to be informed about new posts by e-mail. If you have a GitHub account, you can get the same effect by following updates to the repository that contains my blog. But the easiest way to learn about new posts is to follow me on Twitter.
The lifecycle of digital scientific knowledge
Like all information with a complex structure, scientific knowledge evolves over time. New ideas turn into validated models, and are ultimately integrated into a coherent body of knowledge defined by the concensus of a scientific community. In this essay, I explore how this process is affected by the ever increasing use of computers in scientific research. More precisely, I look at "digital scientific knowledge", by which I mean scientific knowledge that is processed using computers. This includes both software and digital datasets. For simplicity, I will concentrate on software, but much of the reasoning applies to datasets as well, if only because the precise meaning of non-trivial datasets is often defined by the software that treats them.
A rant about software deployment in 2015
We all know that software deployment in a research environment can be a pain, but knowing this as a fact is not quite the same as experiencing it in reality. Over the last days, I spent way more time that I would have imagined on what sounds like a simple task: installing a scientific application written in Python on a Linux machine for use by a group of students in a training session. Here is an outline of the difficulties, in the hope that it will (1) help others who face similar problems and (2) contributes a little bit to improving the situation.
Beyond Jupyter: what's in a notebook?
One key observation is in Gaël Varoquaux's comment on Kirill's blog post: using Jupyter for doing science creates a lock-in, because all collaborators on a project must agree on using Jupyter. There is no other tool that can be used productively for working with notebooks. It's a case of "wordization": digital content is taken hostage by a tool that defines a storage format for its own convenience without much consideration for other tools, be they competing or complementary. Wordization not only restricts the users' freedom to work with their data, but also creates headaches for the future. A data format defined by a tool can easily become unusable as the tool evolves and introduces incompatibilities, or of course if it disappears. In the case of Jupyter, its developers have always provided upgrade paths for notebooks between versions, but at some time this is bound to create trouble. Bugs are a fact of life, and I don't expect that the version-2-compatibility-feature will get much testing in Jupyter version 23. To make it worse, a Jupyter notebook can depend on third-party code that implements embedded widgets. This is one of the reasons why I don't use Jupyter for my research, although I am a big fan of using it for teaching. The other reason is that I cannot usefully link a notebook to other relevant information, such as code and data dependencies. Jupyter doesn't provide any functionality for this, and they are hard to implement externally exactly because of wordization.
Wordization is often associated with evil intentions of market dominance, as they are regularly assumed for a company like Microsoft. But I believe that the fundamental cause is the obsession with tools over content that has driven the computing industry for many years. The tool aspects of a piece of software, such as its feature list and its user interface, are immediately visible. On the contrary, its data model attracts attention only by a few specialists, if at all. Users feel the consequences of bad (or absent) data model design through the symptoms of wordization, in particular lock-in, but rarely understand where it comes from. Interestingly, this problem was also mentioned yesterday at the OpenDreamKit meeting, by Michael Kohlhase who discussed the digital representation of mathematical knowledge and the difficulty of exchanging it between different software tools. I have written earlier about another aspect, the representation of scientific models in computational science, which illustrates the extreme case of tools having absorbed scientific content to the point that its users don't even realize that something is missing.
Back to notebooks. Let's forget about tools for the moment and consider the question of what a notebook actually is, as a digital document. I think that notebooks are trying to be two different things, and that many of the problems we have with them come from this ambiguity. One role of notebooks is the documentation of computational work as a narrative with direct access to the data. This is why people publish notebooks. The other role is as a protocol of interactive explorative work, i.e. the computational scientist's equivalent of a lab notebook. The two roles are not completely unrelated, but they still significatively different.
To see the difference, look at how experimental scientists worked in the good old days of pencil, paper, and the printing press. As experiments were done, all the relevant information (preparation, results, …) was written down, immediately, with a time stamp, in the lab notebook. Like a bank ledger, a lab notebook is an immutable protocol of what happened. You don't go back and change earlier entries, that would even be considered fraud. You just add information at the end. Of course, the resulting protocol is not a good way to communicate one's findings. Therefore they are distilled and written up in a separate narrative, which surrounds a description of the work and its most important results by a motivating introduction and summarizing conclusions. This is the classic scientific article.
Today's computational notebooks are trying to be both protocol and narrative, and pretend that there is a fluent transition between them. One unfortunate consequence is that computational protocols disappear as they are edited to become narratives. This could be alleviated by keeping notebooks under version control, but I have yet to see good versioning support in any notebook-type tool. But, fundamentally, today's notebook tools don't encourage keeping a protocol. They encourage frequent changes to the code and the results, keeping only the latest version. As editors for narratives, notebook tools are also far from ideal because they encourage interactive execution of small code snippets, making it easy to lose track of what was actually executed and in what order. In Jupyter, the only way to ensure a coherent narrative is to (1) restart the kernel and (2) re-execute all cells. There is not even a single menu entry for this operation. Actually, I wonder how many Jupyter users are aware that they must restart the kernel before re-executing all the cells if they want to ensure reproducibility.
With all that said, here is my current idea of what a notebook should look like at the bit level. A notebook data model should have two distinct entries, one for a protocol and one for a narrative. The protocol entry is a sequence of code cells and results, as they were executed since the start of the computation (for Jupyter, that means the last kernel restart). The narrative is a user-edited sequence of code cells, documentation cells, and results. The actual cell contents could well be shared between the two views: store each cell with a unique ID, and make the protocol and the narrative simple lists of IDs. The representation of code and documentation cells in such a data model is straightforward, though there's a huge potential for bikeshedding in defining the details. The representation of results is much more difficult if you want to support more than plain text output. In the long run, it will be inevitable to define clear data models for every type of display widget, which is a lot of work.
From the tool point of view, the current Jupyter interface could be complemented by a non-editable protocol view. I'd also like to see a single command (menu/keyboard) for the "clean slate" operation: save the current state as a snapshot (or commit it directly to version control), restart the kernel, and re-initialize the protocol to an empty list. But what really matters to me is the data model. Contrary to the current one implemented in Jupyter, the one outlined above could be integrated into workflow management and archivation tools, such as my own ActivePapers. We'd probably see an Emacs mode for working with it as well. Plus pretty-printing tools, analysis tools, etc. We'd see an ecosystem of tools working with notebooks. A Dream of Openness.
The future of the Scientific Python ecosystem
SciPy 2015 is over, meaning that many non-participants like myself are now busy catching up with what happened by watching the videos. Today's dose for me was Jake VanderPlas' keynote entitled "State of the Tools". It's about the history, current state, and potential future of what is now generally known as the Scientific Python ecosystem: the large number of libraries and tools written in or for Python that scientists from many disciplines use to get their day-to-day computational work done.
History is done, the present status is a fact, but the future is open to both speculation and planning, so that's what I find most interesting in Jake's keynote. What struck me is that everything he discussed was about paying back technical debt: refactoring the core libraries, fixing compatibility problems, removing technical obstacles to installation and use of various tools. In fact, 20 years after Python showed up in scientific computing, the ecoystem is in a state that is typical for software projects of that age: a bit of a mess. The future work outlined by Jake would help to make it less of a mess, and I hope that something like this will actually happen. The big question mark for me is how this can be funded, given that it is "only" maintenance work, producing nothing fundamentally new. Fortunately there are people much better than me at thinking about funding, for example everyone involved in the NumFOCUS foundation.
Jake's approach to outlining the future is basically "how can we fix known problems and introduce some obvious improvements" (but please do watch the video to get the full story!). What I'd like to present here is an alternate approach: imagine an ideal scientific computing environment in 2015, and try to approximate it by an evolution of the current SciPy ecosystem while retaining a sane level of backwards compatibility. Think of it as the equivalent of Python 3 at the level of the core of the scientific ecosystem.
One aspect that has changed quite a bit over 20 years is the interaction between Python and low-level code. Back then, Python had an excellent C interface, which also worked well for Fortran 77 code, and the ease of wrapping C and Fortran libraries was one of the major reasons for Python's success in scientific computing. We have seen a few generations of wrapper code generators, starting with SWIG, and the idea of a hybrid language called Pyrex that was the ancestor of today's Cython. LLVM has been a major game changer, because it permits low-level code to be generated and compiled on-the-fly, without explicitly generating wrappers and compiling code. While wrapping C/C++/Fortran libraries still remains important, the equally important task of writing low-level code for performance can be handled much better with such tools. Numba is perhaps the best-known LLVM-based code generator in the Python world, providing JIT compilation for a language that is very similar to a subset of Python. But Numba is also an example of the mindset that has led to the current mess: take the existing ecosystem as given, and add a piece to it that solves a specific problem.
So how would one approach the high-/low-level interface today, having gained experience with LLVM and PyPy? Some claim that the distinction doesn't make sense any more. The authors of the Julia language, for example, claim that it "avoids the two-language problem". However, as I have pointed out on this blog, Julia is fundamentally a performance-oriented low-level language, in spite of having two features, interactivity and automatic memory management, that are traditionally associated with high-level languages. By the way, I don't believe the idea of a both-high-and-low-level language is worth pursuing for scientific computing. The closest realization of that idea is Common Lisp, which is as high-level as Python, perhaps more so, and also as low-level as Julia, but at the cost of being a very complex language with a very steep learning curve, especially for mastering the low-level aspects. Having two clearly distinct language levels makes it possible to keep both of them manageable, and the separation line serves as a clear warning sign to scientists, who should not attempt to cross it without first acquiring some serious knowledge about software development.
The model to follow, in my opinion, is the one of Lush and Terra. They embed a low-level language into a high-level language in such a way that the low-level code is a data structure at the high level. You can use literals for this data structure and get the equivalent of Numba. But you can also write code generators that specialize low-level code for a given problem. Specialization allows both optimization and simplification, both of which are desirable. The low-level language would have arrays as a primitive data structure, and both NumPy and Pandas, or evolutions such as xray, would become shallow Python APIs to such low-level array functionality. I think this is much more powerful than today's Numba building on NumPy. Moreover, wrapper generators become simple plain Python code, making the construction of interfaces to complex libraries (think of h5py) much easier than it is today. Think of it as ctypes on steroids. For more examples of what one could do with such a system, look at metaprogramming in Julia, which is exactly the same idea.
Another aspect that Jake talks about in some detail is visualization. There again, two decades of code written by people scratching their own itches has led to a mess of different libraries with a lot of overlap and no clear distinctive features. For cleaning it up, I propose the same approach: what are the needs and the available technologies for scientific visualization in 2015? We clearly want to profit from all the Web-based technologies, both for portability (think of mobile platforms) and for integration with Jupyter notebooks. But we also need to be able to integrate visualization into GUI applications. From the API point of view, we need something simple for simple plots (Toyplot looks promising), but also more sophisticad APIs for high-volume data visualization. The main barrier to overcome, in my opinion, is the current dominance of Matplotlib, which isn't particularly good in any of the categories I have outlined. Personally, I don't believe that any evolution of Matplotlib can lead to something pleasant to use, but I'd of course be happy to be proven wrong.
Perhaps the nastiest problem that Jake addresses is packaging. He seems to believe that conda is the solution, but I don't quite agree with that. Unless I missed some recent evolutions, a Python package prepared for installation through conda can only be used easily with a Python distribution built on conda as well. And that means Anaconda, because it's the only one. Since Anaconda is not Open Source, there is no way one can build a Python installation from scratch using conda. Of course, Anaconda is perfectly fine for many users. But if you need something that Anaconda does not provide, you may not be able to add it yourself. On the Mac, for example, I cannot compile C extensions compatible with Anaconda, because Mac Anaconda is built for compatibility with ancient OSX versions that are not supported by a standard XCode installation. Presumably that can be fixed, but I suspect that would be a major headache. And then, how about platforms unsupported by Anaconda?
Unfortunately I will have to leave this at the rant level, because I have no better proposition to make. Packaging has always been a mess, and will likely remain a mess, because the underlying platforms on which Python builds are already a mess. Unfortunately, it's becoming more and more of a problem as scientific Python packages grow in size and features. It's gotten to the point where I am not motivated to figure out how to install the latest version of nMOLDYN on my Mac, although I am a co-author of that program. The previous version is good enough for my own needs, and much simpler to install though already a bit tricky. That's how you get to love the command line… in 2015.
Another look at Julia
Three years ago, I first looked at the then-very-new language Julia. Back then, I concluded that there were many interesting features, but also regretted too much bad Matlab influence in the array handling.
A hands-on Julia tutorial in my neighborhood was a good occasion to take another look at this language, which has evolved quite a bit since 2012, and continues to evolve rapidly. The tutorial taught by David Sanders was an excellent introduction, and his notebooks should even be good for self-teaching. If you already have some experience in computational science, and are interested in trying Julia out on small practical applications, have a look at them.
The good news is that Julia has much improved over the years, not only by being more complete (in particular in terms of libraries), but also through changes in the language itself. More changes are about to happen with version~0.4 which is currently under development. The changes being discussed include the array behavior that I criticized three years ago. It's good to see references to APL in this discussion. I still believe that when it comes to arrays, APL and its successors are an excellent reference. It's also good to see that the Julia developers take the time to improve their language, rather than rushing towards a 1.0 release.
Due to David's tutorial, this time my contact with Julia was much more practical, working on realistic problems. This was a good occasion to appreciate many nice features of the language. Julia has taken many good features from both Lisp and APL, and combined them seamlessly into a language that, in spite of some warts, is overall a pleasure to use. A major aspect of Julia's Lisp heritage is the built-in metaprogramming support. Metaprogramming has always been difficult to grasp, which was clear as well during the tutorial. It isn't obvious at all what kind of problem it helps to solve. But everyone who has used a language with good metaprogramming support doesn't want to go back.
A distinctive feature of Julia is that it occupies a corner of the programming language universe that was almost empty until now. In scientific computing, we have traditionally had two major categories of languages. "Low-level" languages such as Fortran, C, and C++, are close to the machine level: data types reflect those directly handled by today's processors, memory management is explicit and thus left to the programmer. "High-level" languages such as Python or Mathematica present a more abstract view of computing in which resources are managed automatically and the data types and their operations are as close as possible to the mathematical concepts of arithmetic. High-level languages are typically interpreted or JIT-compiled, whereas low-level languages require an explicit compilation step, but this is not so much a feature of the language as of their age and implementation.
Julia is resolutely modern in opting for modern code transformation techniques, in particular under-the-hood JIT compilation, making it both fully compiled and fully interactive. In terms of the more fundamental differences between "low-level" and "high-level", Julia chooses an unconventional approach: automatic memory management, but data types at the machine level.
As an illustration, consider integer handling. Julia's default integers are the same as C's: optimal machine-size signed integers with no overflow checks on arithmetic. The result of 10^50 is -5376172055173529600, for example. This is the best choice for performance, but it should be clear that it can easily create bugs. Traditional high-level languages use unlimited integers by default, eventually offering machine-size integers as a optimization option for experienced programmers. Julia does have a BigInt type, but using it requires a careful insertion of big(...) in many places. It's there if you absolutely need it, but you are expected to use machine-sized integers most of the time.
As a consequence, Julia is a power tool for experienced scientific programmers who are aware of the traps and the techniques to avoid falling into them. Julia is not a language suitable for beginners or occasional users of scientific programming, because such inexperienced scientists need more of a safety net than Julia provides. Neither is Julia a prototyping language for trying out new ideas, because when concentrating on the science you also need a safety net that protects you from the traps of machine-level abstractions. In Julia, you have to design your own safety net, and you also have to verify that it is strong enough for your needs.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Julia is that this is not obvious at first glance. Julia comes with all the nice interactive tools for rapid development and interactive data analysis, in particular the IJulia notebook which is basically the same as the now-famous IPython/Jupyter notebook. At a first glance, Julia looks like a traditional high-level language. A strong point of David's Julia tutorial is that it points out right from the start that Julia is different. Whenever a choice must be made between run-time efficiency and simplicity, clarity, or correctness, Julia always chooses efficiency. The least important consequence is surprising error messages that make sense only with a basic understanding of how the compiler works. The worst consequence is that inexperienced users are easily induced to write unsafe code. There are nice testing tools, in particular FactCheck which looks very nice, but scientists are notoriously unaware of the need of testing.
The worst design decision I see in Julia is the explicit platform dependence of the language: the default integer size is either 32 or 64 bits, depending on the underlying platform. This default size is used in particular for integer constants. As a consequence, a Julia program does in general not have a single well-defined result, but two distinct results. This means that programs must be tested on two different architectures, which is hard to do even for experienced programmers. Given the ongoing very visible debate about the (non-)reproducibility of computational research, I cannot understand how anyone can make such a decision today. Of course I do understand the performance advantage that results from this choice, but this clearly goes to far for my taste. If I ever use Julia for my research, I'll start each source code file with @assert WORD_SIZE==64 just to make sure that everyone knows what kind of machine I tested my code on.
As for the surprising but not dangerous features that can probably only be explained by convenience for the compiler, there is first of all the impossibility to redefine a data type without clearing the workspace first - and that means losing your whole session. It's a bit of a pain for interactive development, in particular in IJulia notebooks. Another oddity is the const declaration, which makes a variable to which you can assign new values as often as you like, as long as the type remains the same. It's more a typed variable declaration than the constant suggested by the name.
Finally, there is another point where I think the design for speed has gone too far. The choice of machine-size integers turns into something completely useless (in my opinion) when it comes to rational arithmetic. Julia lets you create fractions by writing 3//2 etc., but the result is a fraction whose nominator and denominator are machine-size integers. Rational arithmetic has the well-known performance and memory problem of denominators growing with each additional operation. With machine-size integers, rational arithmetic rapidly crashes or returns wrong results. Given that the primary application of rationals is unlimited precision arithmetic, I don't see a practical use for anything but Rational{BigInt}.
In the end, Julia leaves me with a feeling of a lost opportunity. My ideal software development environment for computational science would support the whole life cycle of computational methods, starting from prototyping and ending with platform-specific optimizations. As code is progressively optimized based on profiling information, each version would be used as a reference to test the next optimization level. In terms of fundamental language design, Julia seems to have everything required for such an approach. However, the default choice of fast-and-unsafe operations almost forces programmers into premature optimization. Like in the traditional high-/low-level language world, computational science will require two distinct languages, a safe and a fast one.
The compartmentalization of knowledge
Now that the birch pollen season is definitely over, I can draw some conclusions from a two-year experiment with the impressive sample size of one - myself. As you will see, my topic is not so much the experiment itself, but the circumstances in which it happened.
I have been allergic to birch pollen for more than thirty years. My allergy is strong enough to make normal life impossible when the birch pollen concentration is high, which happens for about three to four weeks every year. For those who have no experience with allergies, consider how sneezing five times in five minutes a few times per hour would impact your daily activities. Like most victims of pollen allergy, I consulted medical doctors in search for relief. In the course of thirty years spent in various places, even different countries, I have seen many of them, from three categories: general practitioner, otorhinolaryngologists, and allergologists. All these doctors agreed that the only reasonable treatment is antiihistamines, arguing that the only other option, immunosuppressive treatments such as cortisone, has side effects that are too severe compared to the benefit obtained.
Unfortunately, antihistamines also have a frequent side effect: drowsiness. Its degree varies between people and across different antihistamines. But in spite of undeniable progress over the years, I have yet to try an antihistamine that I could live with comfortably. I was always faced with the choice of the lesser evil: sneezing or drowsiness. I usually tried to take antihistamines as little as possible, based of birch pollen concentration forecasts, but I found that strategy hard to apply in practice.
So far for the motivation for my recent experiment. Last year I discovered, somewhat by accident, a herbalist in Paris offering a mixture of eight plant extracts for treating allergy symptoms. I asked if they considered their product sufficient as the sole treatment for a rather severe case of birch pollen allergy. They said it's worth a try, though they didn't want to make a clear promise. I tried, and it worked. Perfectly. No sneezing, no side effects. Spring 2014 was the first one I fully enjoyed since ages ago. Spring 2015 was the second. I haven't taken any antihistamines since then, nor any other allergy treatment recognized by official medecine. Of course, my new treatments has its drawbacks as well. First, it's rather expensive, about 40€ for one birch pollen season. Second, you can't take a single daily dose, you have to distribute it over the day. I followed the recommendation to dilute the daily dose in a bottle of water, which I carried with me and drank over the day.
My sample-size-one study doesn't of course permit any conclusions about the efficiency of this treatment for allergies in general, but that's not my point anyway. What I find remarkable about this story is that a small herbalist shop in Paris offers something that according to all medical doctors I ever consulted doesn't exist. Herbal remedies have been used by people all over the world for all of known history. All the eight plants in my new treatment (Plantago lanceolata, artichoke, arctium, boldo, desmodium, dandelion, horsetail, thyme) have been used by herbalists for centuries. Combining them into an efficient treatment certainly requires some solid knowledge about medical plants, but probably not a stroke of genius. How is it possible then that not even specialized allergologists are aware of such treatments? Even if it works only for 10% of pollen victims (a number I just made up), it's worth knowing about.
This compartmentalization of knowledge between traditional herbalists and 21st century medical doctors, which I suspect to be due to pure snobism, is also a lost opportunity for medical research. According to the description of my plant mixture on the Web site, its mode of action is completely different from that of antihistamines. Studying these mechanisms might well lead to new insight into the causes of pollen allergies and their treatments.
Software in scientific research
In a recent blog post, Titus Brown asks if software is a primary product of science, and basically says "no" (but do read the post for the details). A blog-post length reply by Daniel Katz comes to the opposite conclusion (again, please read the post before continuing here). I left a short comment on Titus' blog but also felt compelled to expand this into a blog post of its own - so here it is.
Titus introduces a useful criterion for what "primary product of science" is: could you get a Nobel prize for it? As Dan comments, Nobel prizes in science are awarded for discoveries and inventions. There we no computers when Alfred Nobel set up his foundation, so we have to extrapolate this definition a bit to today's situation. Is software like a discovery? Clearly not. Like an invention? Perhaps, but it doesn't fit very well. Dan makes a comparison with scientific writing, i.e. papers, textbooks, etc. Scientific writing is the traditional way to communicate discoveries and inventions. But what scientists get Nobel prizes for is not the papers, but the work described therein. Papers are not primary products of science either, they are just a means of communication. There is a fairly good analogy between papers and their contents on one hand, and software and algorithms on the other hand. And algorithms are very well comparable to discoveries and inventions. Moreover, many of today's scientific models are in fact expressed as algorithms. My conclusion is that algorithms clearly count as a primary product of science, but software doesn't. Software is a means of communication, just like papers or textbooks.
The analogy isn't perfect, however. The big difference between a paper and a piece of software is that you can feed the latter into a computer to make it do something. Software is thus a scientific tool a well as a means of communication. In fact, today's computational science gives more importance to the tool aspect than to the communication aspect. The main questions asked about scientific software are "What does it do?" and "How efficient is it?" When considering software as a means of communication, we would ask questions such as "Is it well-written, clear, elegant?", "How general is the formulation?", or "Can I use it as the basis for developing new science?". These questions are beginning to be heard, in the context of the scientific software crisis and the need for reproducible research. But they are still second thoughts. We actually accept as normal that the scientific contents of software, i.e. the models implemented by it, are understandable only to software specialists, meaning that for the majority of users, the software is just a black box. Could you imagine this for a paper? "This paper is very obscure, but the people who wrote it are very smart, so let's trust them and base our research on their conclusions." Did you ever hear such a claim? Not me.
Scientists haven't yet fully grasped the particular status of software as both an information carrier and a tool. That may be one of the few characteristics they share with lawyers. The latter make a difference between "data" (including written text), which is covered by copyright, and "software", which is covered by both copyright and licenses, and in some countries also by patents. Superficially, this makes sense, as it reflects the dual nature of software. It suffers, however, from two problems. First of all, the distinction exists only in the intention of the author, which is hard to pin down. Software is just data that can be interpreted as instructions for a computer. One could conceivably write some interpreter that turns previously generated data into software by executing it. Second, and that's a problem for science, the licensing aspect of software is much more restrictive than the copyright aspect. If you describe an algorithm informally in a paper, you have to deal only with copyright. If you communicate it in executable form, you have to worry about licensing and patents as well, even if your main intention is more precise communication.
I have written a detailed article about the problems resulting from the badly understood dual nature of scientific software, which I won't repeat here. I have also proposed a solution, the development of formal languages for expressing complex scientific models, and I am experimenting with a concrete approach to get there. I mention this here mainly to motivate my conclusion:
- Q: Is software a primary product of science?
- A: No. But neither is a paper or a textbook.
- Q: Is software a means of communication for primary products of science?
- A: Yes, but it's a bad one. We need something better.
Tags: computational science, computer-aided research, emacs, mmtk, mobile computing, programming, proteins, python, rants, reproducible research, science, scientific computing, scientific software, social networks, software, source code repositories, sustainable software
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