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>I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialized very narrowly in their domain will also want to be full-time software engineers too and choose o
by whymauri 6y ago
>I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialized very narrowly in their domain will also want to be full-time software engineers too and choose one of the most complex languages on top of that.
I think it's really field-dependent. I know academics/profs in the computational biology space that accumulate a looot of software over time from their colleagues/students. Also, it's not the scientists/PIs writing the software :P
- walleeee 6y agoYes. And a lot of that software collects dust after the paper it produced is published :/ Academia needs to recognize and incentivize software (including maintenance) as a research output, and make funding available for more research software engineers.
- sida 6y agoDo these software collect dust and rust over time? ok sorry.. bad dad joke..
- walleeee 6y agowish I'd thought of that...
- pvorb 6y agoThis just made me discover the Dust programming language[1]. [1]: https://bilalhusain.com/dust/ https://bilalhusain.com/dust/
- ibraheemdev 6y agoThere is also DustJS [1]. It is much more popular. 1: https://github.com/linkedin/dustjs https://github.com/linkedin/dustjs
- mattkrause 6y agoAmen! More long-term staff scientist jobs of all stripes! One lesson I hope people take away from AlphaGo/AlphaFold (and a lot of the work coming out of the Allen Institutes, Broad, etc) is that some really amazing work can be done when big groups of experienced people can work together on a project.
- walleeee 6y agoSeriously! My lab does plant root growth modeling, which (like protein folding) is a 3D morphology prediction problem. Tweaking crops for even a small increase in carbon uptake and sequestration in soil (e.g., via deeper or longer roots) may be able to cut a sizeable chunk out of annual CO2 emissions[0], but almost nobody's working on it because it doesn't have direct applications to human healthcare. [0]: http://www.nature.com/articles/nature17174 http://www.nature.com/articles/nature17174