Posts from 2016-03
Composition is the root of all evil
Think of all the things you hate about using computers in doing research. Software installation. Getting your colleagues' scripts to work on your machine. System updates that break your computational code. The multitude of file formats and the eternal need for conversion. That great library that's unfortunately written in the wrong language for you. Dependency and provenance tracking. Irreproducible computations. They all have something in common: they are consequences of the difficulty of composing digital information. In the following, I will explain the root causes of these problem. That won't make them go away, but understanding the issues will perhaps help you to deal with them more efficiently, and to avoid them as much as possible in the future.
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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