On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 06:20:13PM -0400, Ruth Collings wrote: > I believe if we're going to seek to teach ideas rather than > step-by-step rote work describing the pros and cons of every tool we > cover is important.
Pros and cons relative to what? It's not like *all* the students are debating R vs. Excel. Some may be debating R vs. Python, or R vs. C, or …. I think it's good to mention the fact that alternative tools exist, emphasize that the practices we're teaching are tool agnostic, and give a line or a slide about why we're using the tool we're using vs. other choices we've considered (for examples, see [1,2]). Getting into more detail than that seems hard to do outside of a one-to-one conversation or an explicit “Why not $x” question. Cheers, Trevor [1]: https://github.com/swcarpentry/bc/pull/623 [2]: http://git.tremily.us/?p=swc-version-control-git.git;a=blob;f=README.md;hb=HEAD -- This email may be signed or encrypted with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
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