On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 03:36:23PM +0000, GRANT Alistair wrote: > Hi, > > I???ve only just started reading this thread and I think that Bennet and > Erik kind of hit the nail on the head - I too thought SWC/DC were about > concepts of good programming practice, version control, testing, analysis > and things like that. But there seems to be a real shift towards pushing > specific tools and stacks over the past year or so.
I'm about to go old codger... Hopefully this will be interesting history for y'all :). And hopefully Greg will step up to correct my mis-statements. So! Actually! A significant early goal of Software Carpentry was to *build* better tools! Some of you may remember scons and DrProject; their roots were in a competition to design new tools, hinted at here http://www.scons.org/doc/0.94.1/HTML/scons-python10/t1.html and described in greater detail in Greg's recent blog post, http://third-bit.com/2015/12/06/just-keep-swimming.html ---- Software Carpentry went through a number of iterations and digressions and evolutionary spurs that dead-ended - for example, I got involved in 2007 as a postdoc with a workshop at LLNL, ivory.idyll.org/blog/intermediate-software-carpentry.html but those materials have never really gone anywhere. --- My interpretation of the outcome of the "tools" phase was that Greg and others realized that building tools was easier than getting community adoption and that people often adopted sub-par tools for irrational or hard to predict reasons (Follow The Leader, or Hey! A Community!) and that really we should be in the business of teaching good practice using whatever tools were being used, while keeping an eye out for what tools might be better than what we are currently using. The only perspective this display of my gray hair really provides IMO is that Greg nucleated and built (and we are now all maintaining and expanding) an amazing community of practice, and practice inevitably evolves. Jupyter Notebook didn't exist until ~2011, and it seems like it won't be a "current" product in 2021 (maybe JupyterLab?); but if we've taught people right, they can figure out why they would need Tool X, and learn how to use it, on their own. cheers, --titus _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
