I think it is, in certain fields. Nowadays, a lot of scientists need to interface with things like databases which are completely foreign to them, so a whole ho

I think it is, in certain fields. Nowadays, a lot of scientists need to interface with things like databases which are completely foreign to them, so a whole host of tools has sprung up to take some of the work out of common tasks. For one example, I've been working on an application that helps acquire scientific data from published text files in various formats, clean it all up (removing weird things like -999 being used as Null), and put it in a database. It has received very positive reviews so far.