Dear Mike & All, On Wed, May 04, 2016 at 04:33:44PM +0100, Michael J Jackson wrote: > Hi, > > Quoting Dirk Eddelbuettel <[email protected]> on Tue, 3 May 2016 15:53:14 -0500: > > >My two daughters are in that very age bracket. The older one is off to > >college in the fall and just did a year-long reasearch project which, per the > >instructions of her teacher, did it 'all wrong' by our standards: data > >analysis, regression, charts in Excel; write-up in Word and presentations in > >Powerpoint. > > As one who writes everything in MarkDown by preference, are Word and > PowerPoint "all wrong"? Yes, their binary formats don't play so well > with revision control than plain-text formats such as MarkDown or > LaTeX, for example (but sticking them under revision control is > still of great benefit). In other ways they're superior: WYSIWYG > editors, no compilation steps, PDF-generation from within the tool, > and they're ubiquitous. Similarly, for some tasks they allow a user > to "do more in less time with less pain" than the alternatives*.
I doubt that this is true in the long run -- it's a typical "short term gain for a long term pain", or a case of technical debt [1], which is a concept that may be considered to come from "hardcore" software engineering but which I think is well worth pondering. Concretely, the pain manifests itself when it comes to further working with the material. For Word, my main concern is the long term viability of the format, i.e. ability to even just print a document. A LaTeX paper is readable as long as the ASCII / Unicode is not lost from humankind's collective knowledge base, but reading a Word document that was never opened / migrated since the turn of the millennium is a lottery game. Issues like playing more or less well with revision management etc. are in my view rather secondary compared to that of long term viability. An issue that irks me personally is that of "PDF generation from within the tool" -- that's just inconsistent with the "do one thing and do that well" approach, but I think that's secondary as well. On the whole, I'm increasingly inclined to think people should use whatever they like as long as it's only for writing and not for processing data in any way. If a group of authors wants to send Word files by email back and forth between them, that seems ok with me so long as (1) they manage to safely store their final agreed version of the manuscript (preferrably as a PDF in addition to Word) and (2) they they generate figures and tables in a reproducible / re-executable way. Excel, on the other hand, is truly evil as soon as it's used for any data analysis. Execl is just one big violation of the principle of spearating data from code. As far as I'm concerned, the issues uncovered by Baggerly & Coombes [2] are quite sufficient to advise against using spreadsheets for handling or analysing any kind of scientific data. Through the lens of technical debt, that is paid by the scientific community following after you, and that, in my view, and incurring debt like that is something I consider just not acceptable. Best regards, Jan [1] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html [2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.1092 > cheers, > mike > > * Having spent more than the 5 minutes it should have taken > yesterday trying (and failing even with Google's help) to put a > hyperlink to a Wikipedia page with multiple underscores in a LaTeX > document and have it clickable in the resulting PDF. > > > -- > The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in > Scotland, with registration number SC005336. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org -- +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ | email: [email protected] | | WWW: http://www.jtkim.dreamhosters.com/ | *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----* _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
