Hi, Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hin...@cnrs.fr> skribis:
>> I don’t like the phrase “average scientist”, and we’re talking about >> people with a PhD who definitely know how to learn. > > I didn't take that phrase as a reference to ability, but to prior > knowledge. I am pretty sure that anyone who uses Python can also learn > to use Guile, but a computer scientist having experience with ten > languages will have less effort to do so than an archaeologist or a > wetlab biologist who has never used anything else but Python. Yes, I understand and agree with this assessment: making the tools usable without being an expert will be crucial. That said, these same people got used to Dockerfiles, CONDA, pip, Jupyter, CWL, Python, Bash, and whatnot. I think that stating that all this, taken together, has a “smooth learning curve”, is inaccurate. >> Apart from that, I agree with the comments above: putting it in the >> hands of scientists will be the real challenge. I think providing >> modules and ready-to-use “templates” for people who use R+RMarkdown, or >> LaTeX, or Jupyter, etc. is a necessary step. > > I'd start somewhat differently: generate diverse use case examples. The > contributions to the ReScience reproducibility challenge could be a nice > starting point: go through them, one by one, and try to re-implement the > authors' various approaches with Guix. Then, in a second step, try to > identify additional tooling support in Guix that would make the recipes > simpler to implement. That might well lead to the development of ready > to use templates, but I prefer starting from a use case analysis to see > what is needed in real life. Yes, sounds like a good plan! > Another obstacle to adoption is the difficulty of deployment. Right now, > if I use Guix to make my work reproducible, I require my readers to > install Guix on their computers, which is a lot of work for Linux users > and a major headache for Windows/macOS users. We really need to reduce > that barrier to deployment. On Debian and derivatives, it should be possible to run “apt-get install guix” soonish, which should help. For Windows and macOS, I don’t know (I’m personally less interested in that but I agree it would be useful to improve the situation there.) > Some ideas: Simple deployment of a VM running Guix System on a major > cloud provider would be nice to have. Or a service like mybinder.org, > but based on Guix rather than Docker. Or, for local execution, a Docker > image containing Guix plus some tooling to do the equivalent of "guix > time-machine –commit=xxx – build -f guix.scm" plus copying the contents > of the generated package into the user's directory. Yes, we should discuss individual solutions along these lines. Thanks, Ludo’.
