Dear All,
I'm preparing a talk centred on reproducible computing, and as this is
a topic relevant and valued by SWC I'd like to ask your opinion and
comments about this.
One approach I take is checking to which extent my work from 10 - 20
years ago is reproducible today, and (perhaps not surprisingly) I found
that having used make, scripts and (relatively) well defined text
formats turns out to be higly beneficial in this regard.
This has led me to wonder about some of the tools that currently seem
to be popular, including on this list, but to me appear unnecessarily
fat / overloaded and as such to have an uncertain perspective for long
term reproducibility:
* "notebook" systems, and iPython / jupyter in particular:
- Will the JSON format for saving notebooks be readable /
executable in the long term?
- Are these even reproducible in a rigorous sense, considering
that results can vary depending on the order of executing cells?
* Virtual machines and the recent lightweight "containerising"
systems (Docker, Conda): They're undoubtedly a blessing for
reproducibility but
- what are the long term perspectives of executing their images
/ environments etc.?
- to which extent is their dependence on backing companies a
reason for concern?
I hope that comments on these are relevant / interesting to the SWC
community, in addition to providing me with insights / inspiration,
and that therefore posting this here is ok.
If you have comments on reproducible scientific computing in general,
I'm interested as well -- please respond by mailing list or personal
reply.
Best regards & thanks in advance, Jan
--
+- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+
| email: [email protected] |
| WWW: http://www.jtkim.dreamhosters.com/ |
*-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----*
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