When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The hubris on display here is: "it works for me, it must be right for everyone". What the author is

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The hubris on display here is: "it works for me, it must be right for everyone". What the author is missing is that the article-reference system is actually more flexible than a tree of dependencies. Consider the obvious example: citing Wikipedia. It's a pain, because Wikipedia changes, so you have to link to a certain revision and if you want to know the author you have to trawl the contributions, which nobody does. And this is true of Wikipedia because Wikipedia is a work in progress: it's not meant to be a presentation of knowledge but a repository of knowledge. Science works like that too, but on the blackboards and notebooks and today blogs and comments of the investigators, which lack real start and end dates and are regularly crossed out or replaced. The work is refined for publication because publications are essentially learning materials, they're written and edited to be as comprehensible as possible for any active researcher in the field to read for education or leisure; likewise in order for citations to be useful the cited works must include some background information which goes a long way in keeping the sciences connected, because it's not rare for analogous problems to pop up in unrelated fields, and it is crucial that researchers from outside each others' fields can read each others' work in order for interdisciplinary collaboration of this form to be possible. But all of this background information is just background noise to the people actively working on a problem and that's why it isn't on the blackboard or in the blog post, and it's why terse notations like dummy indices became popular in scratch work. The divide between the didactic and generative arrangements of scientific work is better explained thus: papers are binaries, not source code. Binaries don't go in source control.