That was my experience as well. Experimentation becomes much easier and for things where you want to run the same analysis every year/month/etc when more data c

That was my experience as well. Experimentation becomes much easier and for things where you want to run the same analysis every year/month/etc when more data comes out it makes things much easier. It's also great when you have computationally expensive steps to just be able to issue a build the world command at the end of the day and have the computer regenerate everything overnight. This was my version of that: https://github.com/pedrocr/codecomp https://github.com/pedrocr/codecomp Ruby made for a good way to have scripting together with more declarative build like tooks (e.g., rake). I also automated the plotting like you did by embedding R snippets. There's probably space for a good framework for this. To be the rails of scientific workflow as it were. Integrate nicely with R/LaTeX/etc for bonus points. Maybe a procrastinating PhD student somewhere will make a name for himself doing this :)