Mark Woodbridge, Imperial College London
deRSE19 – Potsdam – 6 June 2019
Python, the fastest-growing major programming language, has risen in the ranks of programming languages in our survey yet again
While the importance of in silico experiments for the scientific discovery process increases, state-of-the-art software engineering practices are rarely adopted in computational science
Johanson and Hasselbring: Software Engineering for Computational Science: Past, Present, Future
This new paradigm of software creation will require a radical rethinking of the ancestral software engineering and imperative programming practices that have been developed in the second half of the last century.
Erik Meijer: Machine Learning: Alchemy for the Modern Computer Scientist
… our approach is to specify some goal on the behavior of a desirable program, write a rough skeleton of the code that identifies a subset of program space to search, and use the computational resources at our disposal to search this space for a program that works
Andrej Karpathy: Software 2.0
It’s the pattern of technology today, and it’s going to increasingly be the pattern of technology in the future: we humans define what we want to do—we set up goals—and then technology, as efficiently as possible, tries to do what we want.
Stephan Wolfram: A World Run with Code
However, the code itself is not intrinsically valuable except as tool to accomplish some goal. Meanwhile, code has ongoing costs. You have to understand it, you have to maintain it, you have to adapt it to new goals over time. The more code you have, the larger those ongoing costs will be.
Eric Lee: Source Code Is A Liability, Not An Asset
we have unified our Research Data Scientist and Research Software Engineer roles to a common JD … it’s all a spectrum.
James Hetherington, 22 February 2019
If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn’t have needed to created Docker. That’s how important it is. Webassembly on the server is the future of computing.
Solomon Hykes, 27 March 2019
Universities should also be encouraged to create more research software groups.
European Commission Open Science Monitor: Recognising the Importance of Software in Research – Research Software Engineers (RSEs), a UK Example
Funding bodies should include RSEs in the preparation and execution of funding calls
European Commission Open Science Monitor: Recognising the Importance of Software in Research – Research Software Engineers (RSEs), a UK Example
Developers…
a drastic change in the way researchers are incentivised needs to be implemented
European Commission Open Science Monitor: Recognising the Importance of Software in Research – Research Software Engineers (RSEs), a UK Example
m.woodbridge@imperial.ac.uk mwoodbri.github.io/deRSE19/RSE2.0 (CC BY 4.0)
Many thanks to the RSE Team and Jeremy Cohen at Imperial College for their help with preparing this talk