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You Can’t Do Data Science in a GUI
- djs070 9y agoThe article doesn't seem to address the question in the title. Why would they be mutually exclusive?
- LisaG 9y agoDid you watch all of Hadley's video? You might get the title more if you saw/see the whole talk :)
- LisaG 9y agoAlso, the article does state what Hadley's take on the question is: "As Wickham defines data science as “the process by which data becomes understanding, knowledge, and insight”, he advocates using data science tools where value is gained from iteration, surprise, reproducibility, and scalability. In particular, he argues that being a data scientist and being programmer are not mutually exclusive and that using a programming language helps data scientists towards understanding the real signal within their data. "
- rockybullwinkle 9y agothank you!
- CyberDildonics 9y agoCool, I'll just watch a 75 minute video so I understand a poorly written title, that's reasonable.
- dang 9y agoThe submitted article was https://blog.dominodatalab.com/data-scientist-programmer-mutually-exclusive/?r=1 https://blog.dominodatalab.com/data-scientist-programmer-mut... with the title "Data Scientist? Programmer? Are They Mutually Exclusive?" Since it summarizes a talk, we changed the URL to that of the talk, in keeping with the HN guidelines' request for original sources (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
- warpDriverWIN32 9y agoSo, it really isn't an improvement. Anyone can skim the blog and get the gist of a 75 minute talk-a-thon in seconds, and move right along. The presentation is just beating a dead horse about text expressions edited ina text editor and/or executed at the command line, and interpretted by R, vs. button clicking in R, in a nice IDE that's comfortable and approachable for non-programmers. E.G. le tooling debate du jour, oui oui, monsieur...
- dang 9y agoOK, we'll change back to the text post but keep the title from the original talk. Maybe that will satisfy everybody...
- mistermann 9y agoIn the video at the very start he mentions that the title of the talk is provocative, but when it's used as a title for posting on a site like this, it can obviously backfire a bit. In the Q&A at the end, the very last question asked (regarding visual pipeline GUI's or something like that) was the content probably most directly related to the title. What I think is interesting is that even though he's largely correct, in the real world the ease of use of approachable UI's, even if built on top of objectively substandard application cores, very often wins the race, at least until the next "shift" occurs. This has saved Microsoft's bacon more than once in history.
- akhatri_aus 9y agoIt's a bit baitey.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- anynym 9y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpbtcsGE0OA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpbtcsGE0OA Here's a version of the video with better sound.
- zouhair 9y agoI never understood why people record in stereo when all is happening is people talking. Stereo is awful for that.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- skybrian 9y agoOnly having read the summary, I wonder if he considers a digital notebook (like Jupyter) to be a GUI.
- elchief 9y agoBuilding prototypes in a GUI like RapidMiner is substantially faster than in R or Python
- murukesh_s 9y agoI don't understand why the down votes? It could be true for him, while it could be the opposite way for others. It's all about your perspective. I have said it before, but saying again: Now imagine an alternate universe where there are no tools like photoshop/illustrator invented (No GUI or mouse based operating environments), we would have still created art through command line. Perhaps it would be a sophisticated version of SVG that mostly people with development skills would be producing with the input of designers who would be occasionally checking the design and giving inputs. Now this process have decades of tooling to make things better, like the same arguments we have on repeatability through various tools like macros etc. Now imagine someone coming up with the idea of a basic version of photoshop, we will most probably dismiss that idea. Very few mainstream programmers would adopt such a tool (Enterprises would, as seen with RapidMiner). That doesn't mean one day that would evolve into the Photoshop that we see today and would totally eliminate development effort in producing art. p.s. edited for typos.
- SkyPuncher 9y agoSounds like the same argument people have against Wix and Squarespace - "you can't make a website in a GUI". Yes, you can - but you'll be pretty limited. If you're a brick and mortar or service focused business, a website builder is great. If you rely deeply on a customized web experience, you need to do something custom. Same with data science. You can get pretty far with some simple data analysis tool. If you need to go farther, then you need to build custom solutions.
- ben_jones 9y agoIs Excel not a GUI? Photoshop? Unity? You can get pretty damn far with those tools (if not all the way).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dwaltrip 9y agoI think Excel is a bit of both. It is pretty amazing what people do with Excel. It's probably one of the most effective software tools ever created. It straddles this incredible balance between completely free-form input and structured data enabling very powerful functionality.
- cup-of-tea 9y agoBut there could be errors hiding anywhere. All you know is it looks correct.
- dwaltrip 9y agoSure, but the cost to fix that issue, and the flexibility you have to give up to do so, is apparently not worth it most of the time, if we look at how people use the software. Perhaps there is a systematic undervaluing of more polished, robust custom solutions by excel users across the world. That could be the case. But there is also probably an under-supply of adequate custom solutions. I have seen comments over the years on HN from people who have had much success in consultanting gigs where they simply built custom tools to replace ad-hoc workflows and processes living in places like Excel.
- goerz 9y agoI’m not quite sure what he’s thinking of as a “GUI” in this context. What is R Studio? Are there actually people that use “GUI’s” for data science? Seems to me everyone is using R or Jupyter notebooks, or plain scripting
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mygo 9y agoexactly. the way I understood it, if you’re interfacing with a computer monitor instead of shuffling around magnetic bits on the disk by sending electric impulses directly to the write head, you’re using a graphical interface are you not?
- goatlover 9y agoIn a sense, but GUI has always meant some kind of windowing/icon based form of navigation and running commands from menus or other mouse-based events, as opposed to using some kind of shell where you're typing in text-based commands. And IDE would straddle both worlds.
- pwneduser 9y agoPretty sure that's not how most people define GUI. You seem to be defining an operating system.
- mygo 9y agoNah. Technically a graphical interface is an interface that is facilitated through the use of graphics. Not all computer interfaces are graphical. Some interfaces are audio/voice (such as Alexa and Siri, Screen readers for the blind). Etc. I think the point I was making is that “what is a GUI” is not objective. And its colloquial definition may also evolve over time. The fundamental question right now is, is text graphical? Some would say no. I’d say yes. What about code highlighting? Code hinting? The buttons on your text editor? aren’t those graphical? Of course they are. I’d argue that they are the best GUI for crafting custom computer instructions.
- mirimir 9y agoOK, I could write and execute SQL in a terminal. But I'd rather use MySQL Workbench. I get easy management of tables, views, etc. And flexible display of results. Why would you not want the GUI?
- sanxiyn 9y agoIn the article, "GUI" seems to be used as an opposite to "programming". Analogy would be SQL versus query wizard dialogue.
- mirimir 9y agoOK, then call it "menu-driven" or whatever. There's nothing intrinsically GUI about menus.
- gpm 9y agoI think you're right that the author is using "GUI" as the opposite of programming. I think he's correct with respect to nearly every GUI I've ever seen, but incorrect with respect to what a GUI could do in principle. There's no reason that your wizard dialogue couldn't be exactly as expressive as SQL. In principle you could make a wizard that just built an arbitrary SQL query and ran it. I said "nearly" before, the reason is graphical programming languages, for example unreal engine's blueprints. These are a "gui", and allow general purpose programming. One could imagine a tool with a similar style of programming, that extends them with inline data visualization and other tools, that would both undoubtedly be a GUI, and have all the nice features of programming. I think the better compromise is probably something like jupyter notebooks, but that doesn't mean a GUI couldn't do it. And maybe a better GUI exists that I just haven't managed to imagine.
- mirimir 9y agoOK, but consider MySQL Workbench. One types SQL in a query. Or loads a saved query. And there's an execute button. But unlike working in terminal, the SQL is still on screen after a failed run. And there's red markup pointing to errors. That's the advantage of the GUI.
- nl 9y agoHe also suggests leveraging a programming language for benefits that include reproducibility, data provenance, and the ability to see how data analysis has evolved over time. It's true that tracking data and data provenance is very important and hard in GUI tools. But it's not really that much easier in code either. To be specific about the kinds of problems here, I'm thinking of things like when errors are found in a dataset, new labels are introduced, or you want multiple splits on the data, but you still want the old version to check your metrics against. Yes, you can do things like versioned directories for different data versions (although this tend to break when you are talking about TBs of data). Or you can try using traditional version control tools, but that involves switching between code and your version control tool. Or you can try transformation orientated programming, where you keep the original version of the data and then always transform it to get to the new version. This is slow on large data and fails when new information is introduced. Also, normal version control doesn't work well with modelling code, because you want to use both the old and new versions of the code simultaneously. Greg Brockman talked about this exact problem in the OpenAI/Ycombinator podcast. This is a hard problem to solve - not sure who is working on it.
- tomrod 9y agoHmm. I can, and do okay by it. But I do enjoy using the command line and remain unimpressed with many of R's more "unique"* packages not found in recent Anaconda distributions or in Julia, so perhaps I'm not this blog's target audience. * R packages with low use tend to have highly variable quality. YMMV
- teirce 9y agoI have run into "Data Scientists" in the past that use exclusively Excel and maybe some outstandingly awful SQL.
- gaius 9y agoTo be fair, any job involving data gets title-inflated to data scientist these days. It may not be their fault!
- make3 9y agoI have too, and said "sorry" when they asked me how to deal with a 30k+ lines excel file, as my only answer to them was "learn to program", and that didn't feel like a very helpful thing to say (I still did say it, in the least condescending way I could manage)
- namuol 9y agoYes, healthy skepticism is good, but just because code (i.e. text files) is often the most _powerful_ or _flexible_ tool, doesn't mean it's always the best tool. We (programmers) are notoriously bad at advancing the tools in our field. For a brief history of this, watch "The Future of Programming" talk by Bret Victor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4
- flukus 9y agoThat guy gets an a+ for presentation but I couldn't find much to agree with him on. He talks about code being linear lines of text as though that's a bad thing. We've pretty much been stuck with this as state of the art in our writing systems for thousands of years, what would be your reaction if I suggested everyone should watch videos instead of read books? It's a flexible and easy way to represent a program that no other tool has come close to. > We (programmers) are notoriously bad at advancing the tools in our field. We've been trying to automate ourselves out of jobs for the entirety of the history of the industry yet programmers are in more demand than ever. Everyone wants to work on interesting problems and creating inner platforms is far more interesting than writing boring business logic. Yet for all our efforts we've barely progressed since the 70's, why do you think that is?
- namuol 9y ago> What would be your reaction if I suggested everyone should watch videos instead of read books? Videos are just another useful tool for learning; they don't obviate the need for books, but they're better at conveying some ideas/information than books alone. Just like videos and books aren't mutually-exclusive tools for learning, graphical tools and textfiles aren't mutually-exclusive tools for building programs.
- carlmr 9y ago>We (programmers) are notoriously bad at advancing the tools in our field. I think the tools of our trade have advanced tremendously. Visual Studio for example is an amazing experience for C# programmers, one that most languages don't have. And this is in text tools. Programmers know that text is the most powerful and flexible, which is why we advance those tools that help in working with text. GUI tools are good for people who only want to do something every once in a while. Something they don't need to repeat. Where there's a simple recipe for it. And, yes, programmers don't do that much to advance these, because they have no use for them themselves.
- nicodjimenez 9y agoIf the GUI had a terminal built in, then yes you can. The mistake is to get rid of the terminal altogether instead of trying to augment it.
- cup-of-tea 9y agoNo, like other commenters you miss the points about reproducibility and scrutability. This isn't just about the tool being efficient and precise for the user, it's about tracking exactly what you've done in your process and nothing beats code for that.
- talltimtom 9y agoUsing a GUI doesn’t mean there is no code. SAS JMP lets you work on your data visually yet you still have code that defines you tables and plots, and you can easily work with git or hg.
- mistermann 9y agoAlso Power BI's Power Query, Excel macro recorder, graphical SQL tools, etc
- dfmooreqqq 9y agoJMP was precisely my counterargument to this whole piece. JMP is an excellent data science tool when used correctly and allows for reproducibility. You can even call R from JMP if you need to do something that is easier in R. Further, as others have commented, exploratory data analysis is much easier in an environment like JMP than it is in R - when you're just playing around with the data and trying to get a sense of it, it's much easier to make quick approximate graphs in a GUI than in a command line.
- nicodjimenez 9y agoYeah you're missing my point, just cause you're programming in a browser doesn't mean you can't have access to GNU toolchain, VIM / Emacs, git, ...
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- xioxox 9y agoWhen I started my plotting app, Veusz, https://veusz.github.io/ https://veusz.github.io/, I expected I would mostly be using a command line to drive it. As I improved the GUI, however I found I was very rarely using the command line. GUIs can be very good for exploratory investigation and plot manipulation. Veusz is scriptable, so you get the best of both worlds.
- jancsika 9y ago> GUIs deliberately obfuscate the process as you can only do what the GUI inventors want you to do. One of the problems with programming languages that begin with the letter "p" is that they can be used to create viruses.
- rollulus 9y agoAny thoughts on the R vs Python at 2/3rd of the page? I have the feeling (but no data) that the data science community is moving from R to Python, is that correct?
- pas 9y agoYes. R is horrible.
- dnautics 9y agoR needlessly flaunts convention. Find a function that has the same name in numpy, Matlab, and julia, that function will have an infuriatingly different name in R.
- thousandautumns 9y agoI personally love R and think it is superior to Python for about 90% of data science related tasks.
- pas 9y agoThat's the thing. R is excellent at the statistics (the science, the hypothesis testing, and the other tools - and CRAN has real gems), but completely unusable for data manipulation (cleaning, filtering, discovering/exploration, tinkering), and especially hostile for anyone who is used to real programming languages. (No data pipeline for you, no easy scripting for regular experiments/backtesting. No great APIs, etc.)
- thousandautumns 9y ago> completely unusable for data manipulation (cleaning, filtering, discovering/exploration, tinkering) Surely you aren't serious. Data manipulation is one of the areas in which R is vastly superior to Python.
- raghavsb 9y agoThe talk title is quite provocative but the material discussed not so much. It is true that core data science is iterative, needs to reproducible and more recently explainable. Can you do everything in GUI? It really depends on where you see it from. Early data scientists were programmers before so they loved to code and built tooling around it. While code is still dominant we also see the rise of UI-centric tools - these allow you to build ML pipelines by snapping blocks together. I feel are chasing a "different" type of data scientist. The term data scientist itself has become quite broad. Code, CLI gives data scientists infinite flexibility but setup, management etc. is a challenge. GUI provides very less flexibility but you will have output fast - works for simpler problems IMHO. GUI or not data science has to move to cloud-based tools. Whether you write code in browser or CLI on local machine is matter of choice.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago> GUI or not data science has to move to cloud-based tools. This is a pretty odd statement. Care to explain why?
- raghavsb 9y agoSmaller datasets will work on laptop/desktop. For DL work with large datasets you need to build a GPU workstation. Moreover there setting up environment and dependencies on different hardware setups is not straight forward. Cloud provides the flexibility of choosing the hardware, many open source projects allow you to manage your dependencies and setup better. From 0 to something, cloud is better than custom.
- PeterisP 9y agoFor quite many companies their whole "big data" dataset is small enough to be processed by a single beefy machine. In that case it's far more cost effective to simply plug in $1000 worth of extra ram in a workstation rather than spend some extra engineer-hours to do it remotely.
- 9y ago
- lottin 9y agoThere's no such thing as data science. It's applied statistics. Why invent a silly name?
- twelve40 9y agoAs evident in the comments, it means different things to different people, from straight up Excel to R etc. IMHO, the best data science people I've dealt with have supreme knowledge of statistics and math, combined with the ability to dive deep into python, R, Tableau, viz tools, d3, whatever is needed to get the job done. They generally rely on data engineers to provide sane data, but can jump in as needed and write tools (or at least give guidance) to properly clean up the data themselves. In this context, the GUI vs. non-GUI seems kind of irrelevant.
- tomrod 9y agoBecause "The person you hire into your business to be the crazy mad scientist in the corner who helps with decision making, business development, analysis, and occasionally reporting" is to long for most standard business cards and even most respectable email signatures.
- jsilence 9y agoI'd love to have a bcard with the official job title "mad german scientist". that would be groceartig!
- AriaMinaei 9y agoI didn't watch the talk. So please let me know if I'm mistaken about this one particular point: That the author seems to be warning of limitations of certain solutions, but generalising those limitations to GUIs as a whole. This is wrong. There is nothing inherent in a GUI that would make it unsuitable for coding. Code does not equal text. Code, can be represented in many ways. An AST is code. Text, in a certain syntax, would represent the same code. And so can a GUI. Now, is there a GUI for general-purpose programming that I'd want to use today for production work? No. Will there be one in the future? I believe so. But people discounting coding GUIs left and right, just because they haven't seen a good example of it yet, only discourages others to explore it further. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, to some degree. Anyway, here is a text/GUI-based programming environment (single data / multiple representations) that you might want to play with: luna-lang.org
- scroot 9y ago> But people discounting coding GUIs left and right, just because they haven't seen a good example of it yet, only discourages others to explore it further. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, to some degree And there are good examples from the past, too. History is important and is often ignored by the wider programming community. Personal computing was more or less invented in GUI programming systems. There are environments and architectures from the 1970s that are highly relevant today but that are ignored or downplayed in the mainstream. Such an attitude will stifle progress for sure.
- flukus 9y ago> But people discounting coding GUIs left and right, just because they haven't seen a good example of it yet It's not just because I haven't seen a good example, it's because we have 50 years of bad examples. When something has been tried and failed by so many people for such a length of time you have to at least consider the possibility that the idea is just a fundamentally bad one. I think I'm more likely to see flying cars in my life time then a decent GUI for general purpose programming. The problem with both is that they are fundamentally flawed.
- TuringTest 9y ago
- fredley 9y agoMaybe the title should have been I can't do Data Science in a GUI. There is value in making high-level tools more accessible (and in the process gutting them of some of their power). But maybe not for this author.
- lionel- 9y agoMaybe you could do a "I can do data science in a GUI" talk and amaze us all (addressing all points the OP made). Hadley has been working for years on making data science programming with R accessible: development of expressive domain-specific APIs, books freely available online, etc.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- CharlesDodgson 9y agoI agree with him completely, but I also know that most 'Data Scientists' are just people who know bit of excel and have a head for numbers. I think we just need to be realistic, if your job is to collate sales results every month and create a presentation about something interesting the data, your aren't really a scientist and you can probably just use Excel.
- kome 9y agoSPSS or Stata are GUIs that help to write a reproducible code... are we really arguing about that in 2018? Why so much élitist crap? And btw - more general question - why computer scientists of the 70s (SPSS is from 1968) had much better intuitions of what user needed that computer scientist of today?
- jejones3141 9y agoThanks for the links to videos; the very light gray very thin letters on white skate the edge of legibility.
- poster123 9y agoI bet the female/male ratio is higher for users of Excel than for R or Python. A majority of programmers are men, but the sex ratio of white collar workers (a large fraction of whom use spreadsheets) is much closer to parity. There is often discussion about how to have more women in field X. Opening up field X to non-programmers is one way to do so.
- skate22 9y agoI was once told not to change my source code purely to make my unit test pass. Changing the field to push the ratio towards 50 50 seems similar. I think the real question is: how do we get more females to want to learn to program.
- hood_syntax 9y ago100% this. If people want to push diversity initiatives, go for it, but I think there's no way that leads to real change without starting from the ground up i.e. cultivating childhood interest. Teaching about important women in CS helps break down the cultural expectation of programming as a male thing. In addition, although this is just speculation, I imagine workshops where the participants work to build something practical rather than purely "fun" would appeal to girls. A note-taking or organization or journal or instant messaging application would be great. Something you could use instead of pandering to stereotypes. Maybe I'm wrong about the workshop thing, but I stand by the childhood interest part.
- scroot 9y agoWhy is working with spreadsheets not considered programming?
- vijucat 9y agoActually, I really like these two GUIs which build on the strengths of R by combining the data-exploratory tools that Hadley Wickham created with the visual appeal of ggplot2 (also Hadley!), plot.ly, etc; 1. https://exploratory.io/ https://exploratory.io/ 2. Radiant: https://radiant-rstats.github.io/docs/index.html https://radiant-rstats.github.io/docs/index.html Microsoft IDEAR looks good, too: https://github.com/Azure/Azure-TDSP-Utilities/blob/master/DataScienceUtilities/DataReport-Utils/R/team-data-science-process-idear-instructions.md https://github.com/Azure/Azure-TDSP-Utilities/blob/master/Da... In addition, the automatic insights generated by Power BI are another example of how GUIs can help even the hardcore command-line ninja: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-insights https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-insights
- jernfrost 9y agoYes there is something fundamentally limiting with GUIs that I struggle with trying to express in a comperhensive way to people. You see with almost any task. I see it when working with IDEs e.g. You got complex project management and there is always something you need to do which the designers of the IDE never had in mind. However GUIs make a lot of things easier to do, so I think the ultimate solution is always something that allows you to mix and match GUI and programming/plain text solutions. I think the problem today is that we make these GUI behemoth tools, when it would have been better with a collection of much smaller tools with more dedicated usage.
- iagovar 9y agoKnime is, maybe, what you are looking for. Sad the server version isn't open source AFAIK.
- paradroid 9y agoThis is really stupid. You can do anything in a GUI.
- paradroid 9y agoYes, yes, downvote me, let the hate flow through you. Doesn't change that you can do anything in a gui :)
- ktpsns 9y agoIn general, you can do in a GUI what the programmer planned to enable you to do. As was mentioned previously in this thread, programmers come up with some sort of "graphical programming" frequently, recreating the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect -- Which brings us back to the plain text language of programming and processing where all this is already available.
- fullshark 9y agoData Scientists need to understand that speed trumps statistical rigor for basically 95% of the questions people have. GUIs bring speed.
- trumped 9y agoYou can do anything with the right GUI... So what he means is that there is no proper GUI available?
- projectramo 9y agoYou can use a GUI for the following: 1. Making a video game of a particular type (racing game, shoot em up, 3D shooter etc) 2. Do an analysis of a particular type (regression, ARMA analysis) 3. Make a web page of a particular type (landing page, agency page, personal blog) What you cannot do is use a GUI to do a new kind of thing that the maker of the GUI had not considered. And that is why you can't use it to do any kind of "science" which involves experimenting to see if this new technique will work.
- mr_overalls 9y agoPractically speaking, this is true. Graphical environments typically snap together predefined (or at least minimally configurable) modules of code, Lego-style. Theoretically speaking, of course, all Turing-complete languages are equivalent. You merely need a graphical environment that is expressive enough, i.e. one that can do conditional branching and store items in memory.
- projectramo 9y agoWell, I have one issue/question about this statement. Turing-completeness would be a measure of computational equivalence, but that -- and I don't know if this is the right way to phrase it -- that is not the same as "presentational" equivalence. A modern computer program does computations, but also displays them a certain way and TM's are silent on how you display the results of the computation. (To drive the point home, under no circumstances could Turing's ticker tape machine ever light up a single pixel on a screen.) So, if you had an infinitely fast actual Turing Machine with infinite memory, you could tell me where the video game should go, and how the web page should render and what the regression visualization would look like, but not actually show it to me. Ordinarily this is a pedantic argument to make but in the case of a GUI it is not. The GUI has to actually encode literally an infinite number of options to display the data in addition to computing it. This is particularly important for video games for instance. So, I think you could have a theoretically complete Turing Machine and still not do the things that a modern computing language does.
- gramstrong 9y ago
- cbcoutinho 9y agoOne amazing GUI/visualization tool I use everyday for investigating computation fluid dynamics simulations is ParaView[0]. At the very least, it's a opensource GUI built on top of VTK used for visualizing CFD results, developed by the incredible developers at Kitware (same company that develops CMake). Under the hood, it allows you to separate your client from a {data,rendering} server so that you can visualize large datasets from a small laptop utilizing a client/server model. Besides just data investigation using the GUI, all visualization workflows can be automated either through their python wrapper, or directly through the C++ API. The fact that you can automate the slicing/dicing and post-processing of CFD results on a server remotely using Python still blows my mind. I wouldn't normally associate CFD with data science, but in a way, analyzing CFD results is starting to require the kind of scale of big data, and can certainly be done with the help of a GUI. [0] www.paraview.org
- blakespot 9y agoSure you can! https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/29031630962/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/29031630962/
- itomato 9y agoI was expecting Quantrix
- banku_brougham 9y agoThe criticisms of the talk are valid, but overlook probably the biggest counterexample to the (cool) tools presented here: Tableau. Its dominating many areas of data analysis, yet the terms of service prohibit any scripting or API access to the formation of the XML that compose the .twb workbooks. The user is limited only to GUI clicking, none of which can be stored. So I think its fair to say "You Can't Do Data Science in Tableau," even though its a useful tool and well implemented as a reporting tool. To me it seems a bit of a trap to build proficiency with Tableau and get locked into a closed enterprise product, I'm seeing a lot of data engineers at my company getting sucked into what is essentially a "tableau developer" role.
- jgalt212 9y agoTrue, but you cannot do data science without a GUI.
- baxuz 9y agoWow. And what about https://beta.observablehq.com/ https://beta.observablehq.com/ by Mike Bostock?
- sah2ed 9y ago"You Can't Do Data Science Effectively in a GUI" would have been a more honest title, as that is the crux of the speaker's talk.