Re: good practices in science

[Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>]

Hi Marco,

> Are there any natural scientists here?

I have no idea how numerous we are, but yes, there are. As for myself,
I am in computational biophysics.

> I am sending this to this list because Guix is an obvious tool for
> scientific (and other) computing.  None of my collegues anywhere in
> the world have heard of it and they are not interested when I mention
> it.  (Furthermore, brendyyn on #guix suggested this list.)

Don't worry, that will change.

> In my mind, this must mean that one writes plain text everywhere.
> This is plain/text for e-mail, LaTeX for papers, code is code,
> Markdown or similar for most other documents.  All this is in version
> control.  You can push, share, collaborate quite easily.  Anyone is
> free to make a pretty PDF of it or do whatever else.  Because, of
> course it is all free as in speech.  You know all this.

That is a workflow which is being advocated increasingly. You could
point your doubting colleagues to this MOOC, for example:

  https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/course-v1:inria+41016+self-paced/about

(disclaimer: I am one of its authors). Guix is not covered there, but it
will in a more advanced sequel currently under preparation.

> I would like to find a community where I can do science in a good way.
> I want to use free software and would like to collaborate through
> version control, IRC, Jitsi, well formatted e-mails.  Does such a
> community exist?

It is growing. I can't say about your field or your neigbourhood, but
check out communities such as The Carpentries
(https://carpentries.org/), which is organizing tutorials all around the
globe to teach the tools that you like.

Cheers,
  Konrad