American Scientist Article on How Scientists Use Computers
August 6th, 2009
American Scientist has just published a short article summarizing I wrote summarizing the results from last year’s survey of how scientists actually use computers.
So not all scientists want to be programmers – no surprise there, just like not all accountants want to either, so they have a DSL such as Excel.
An interesting question I asked myself is what is that I do differently if I am not coding for a shared project? Well, I don’t need version control with great support for merging, but I do need version control. Other than that, I think the same way about both situations. At least, I think I do.
@Matt: You do need DVCS when alone, if only to have a repo set up in seconds that gives you easy backups and the freedom to make mistakes.
I was wondering if any data was collected on which programming or scripting languages were used by scientists. This would be helpful to students looking for useful tools.
Were the participants in the survey self-selected? If so, how did you account for or check on the degree of self-selection bias? (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias)