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While I have exactly 0% belief in the success of Fig, and share a lot of the negative sentiment expressed in this thread, your parent post does make a point. I
by gspr 5y ago
While I have exactly 0% belief in the success of Fig, and share a lot of the negative sentiment expressed in this thread, your parent post does make a point.
I spent 10 years in the kind of academic setting described. A LARGE part of the work of the people in this example do their work on ordinary self-managed laptops without a sysadmin in sight (and probably very little common language in which to even begin communicating with a sysadmin, if they even know what a sysadmin is). The amount of time that is wasted by ordinary researchers being very uncomfortable with the terminal is staggering. Although I was/am a researcher in my own right, I do feel that I had an order of magnitude greater positive impact on research by helping out the approximate dozen of other researchers around me do their terminal and programming work more efficiently/better/smoothly/reliably.
I definitely think there's huge room for improvement in this area. But I don't think something like Fig is the answer; safe and effective use of Fig seems to require enough wherewithal to ask someone (or google) how to set up bog standard autocompletion solution in the first place.
- f6v 5y agoThere definitely is a point. I've witnessed too many biologists who decided to get into data analysis struggle with UNIX. I think https://missing.csail.mit.edu https://missing.csail.mit.edu is more of an answer. Most graduate programs just assume you'd pick it up on your own, but the majority doesn't.