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Reproducibility is a major principle of the scientific method. Yet computer scientists consistently fail to achieve reproducibility with a tool that is the mos
by txdv 6y ago
Reproducibility is a major principle of the scientific method.
Yet computer scientists consistently fail to achieve reproducibility with a tool that is the most consistent at following instructions - the computer.
Even private business is on the DevOps movement, because they see the positive effects of reproducibility.
If the academic world is truly about science, then there is no more excuse, the tools are out there, they need to use them.
- Frost1x 6y agoThis is really an artifact if unreasonable expectations and modern software ecosystems. When I say unreasonable expectations, the issue is that people assume they can use the latest greatest trendy library and get reproducible results. Good luck on the level of determinism you're looking for. You need to step back and look at more mature, simple codebases and what you can do in those sorts of environments when you want reproducibility. You can't cobble together a bunch of async services in the cloud and hope your Frankenstein tool gives you perfect results. It will give you good enough results for certain aspects if you focus on those specific aspects (banking does a good job of this with transactional processing and making sure values are consistent because it's their entire business, maybe your account or their web interface is skrewy but that's fine, that can fail).