Quotes
Another interesting SciView interview is available at Blind.Scientist. Here is one quote from Alexei Drummond (Chief Scientist of Biomatters) that I liked:
"I think that bioinformatics has to become a field where people without programming skills can contribute substantially. I would argue that all of the programmers in bioinformatics should be working very hard to program themselves out of their jobs (and into more satisfying jobs)."
Science advances quickly and so do the computational needs. Can we ever do away with these one off scripts if there are always new data types and innovative ways of analyzing them ? I guess the ideas around workflows and such could lead to very visual oriented programing that anyone can do.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Posted by Pedro Beltrão at 3:22 PM
Labels: bioinformatics
1 comments:
"Can we ever do away with these one off scripts if there are always new data types and innovative ways of analyzing them ? I guess the ideas around workflows and such could lead to very visual oriented programing that anyone can do"
Might I suggest to have a look at conceptual modelling languages (ER, UML, ORM, MADS, etc) and their CASE tools? Those languages are (relatively) implementation-independent, so that when, based on the conceptual model, you generate some one-off script in programming language x today, the knowledge is still captured in the conceptual model (and easy to communicate with the biologists) and just as usable for tomorrow when programming language y is the latest hype. They are all visual-oriented or have some GUI with nice icons and, depending on the CASE tool, it generates more or less code for you -- automatically.
Further, there are thigns like 'conceptual query' languages & tools, so that end users don't even have to learn SQL and the like. All of them with tried-and-tested technologies (as opposed to the latest fancy of scientific workflows).
Sure, making conceptual models is not all that easy, and with re-writing and re-developing one-off scipts, there's more work to do. But I dare to suggest there's some either-or w.r.t. goals: does the bioinformatician just want to have some work to do, or is the aim to deliver good and maintainable software? To me, it looks much like the former. But then, I'm not a bioinformatician, so I might have the wrong impression -- you can prove me wrong?
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