C. Titus Brown Sat, 20 Sep 2014 03:45:07 -0700
> Software Carpentry has _always_ been about teaching best practices using a 
> particular toolset,

... or, at least, an *open* toolset, no? My impression is, most folks on this 
list also advocate open-source/open-science--am I missing something? That being 
said, those are certainly separable concerns, I'm not aware of an SC position 
on those topics, and 

$ date ; curl http://software-carpentry.org/faq.html 2> /dev/null | fgrep -ie 
'open' | wc -l
> Sat Sep 20 11:30:36 EDT 2014
> 0

Nevertheless, for those who advocate SC-ing Excel (e.g., showing how to VC it, 
integrating it into reproducibility frameworks, etc): why not, instead, try 
SC-ing an *open-source* spreadsheet? There are several :-) and they 
interoperate well with M$. (<n=1 warning/> My department ~= wholly-owned 
subsidiary of M$ (and ESRI), but I was able to do all my coursework with 
OpenOffice and LaTeX--still learning how to replace ArcGIS.) FWIW, I suspect 
spreadsheets are reproducibility-resistant, but ICBW.

> Haters gonna hate.

Alternatively: the cost of attempting to please every member of an audience 
increases non-linearly with audience size, hence is usually unsupportable past 
a fairly small size. So why try? Better instead, to paraphrase the temperance 
orator JB Gough: stand for the Open and the Reproducible! though every man's 
finger be pointed at you, and every woman's lips be curled in scorn. (As long 
as they're not grantmakers :-)

FWIW, Tom Roche <[email protected]>

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