Posts from 2020-02
The rise of community-owned monopolies
One question I have been thinking about in the context of reproducible research is this: Why is all stable software technology old, and all recent technology fragile? Why is it easier to run 40-year-old Fortran code than ten-year-old Python code? A hypothesis that comes to mind immediately is growing code complexity, but I'd expect this to be an amplifier rather than a cause. In this pose, I will look at another candidate: the dominance of Open Source communities in the development of scientific software.
Tags: computational science, computer-aided research, digital scientific notations, emacs, mmtk, mobile computing, polycrisis, programming, proteins, python, rants, reproducible research, science, scientific computing, scientific software, social networks, software, source code repositories, sustainable software
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