4 ms·

From personal experience, I attest that it can be more difficult than pulling teeth to get a scientist to commit code to a version control system.

• pwang 15y ago
  Greg Wilson once commented that the subversive way to get scientists to use source control was not to pitch it as a code history tool, but rather as a nifty way to sync up code between their work machines, home machines, etc. He said he had a lot more traction with that than trying to lecture them about having code history.
  • pama 15y ago
    Dropbox has invalidated this pitch.
    • eru 15y ago
      Not completely. Git is better at merging.
      • gte910h 15y ago
        Git's also a bit hard for them to handle by themselves with how rarely they need to use it (I'm a huge git proponent, but also a realist).
  • gallamine 15y ago
    I'm guessing Dropbox has introduced many a scientist to the wonders of code history/portability. I was pretty reluctant to move to Git when Dropbox worked fine.
  • Periodic 15y ago
    That's probably good for arguing about good backup practices too. In the department I worked in it was common for grad students to have months of code written on their laptop that was not duplicated anywhere else. The problem is that these students were working independently and didn't really have a need to transfer the code anywhere else.