A lot of advanced analytical tools in biotech at least are developed to be compute cluster compatible, and thus work best on unix-like CLI, e.g. Linux (or Mac with a bit of tinkering)
If stuff is designed for big servers that run Linux, it’s easier to get it to run on a desktop PC if the PC runs Linux too because then it’s the same thing except much less powerful.
Code and snippets to analyze data work well when you can send chunks of it to multiple servers (think analyzing the effect of weather patterns).
Since a lot of that stuff is running on Linux (similar to cloud computing) it makes sense that people that write function/scripts/utilities would already be comfortable in that environment and use it as their daily driver.
They certainly do, at least to an extent. In many fields where you have to work with a lot of data people will use R or Python to handle/transform/perform calculations.
If you compare with excel or similar. They do not write excel the program. But there is a lot of tinkering with algorithms and functions to get the wanted results.
True. HPC definitely plays a big role in the field, and essentially all compute clusters run some sort of Linux distro. Even though clients that can also be run locally then often have Windows binaries too, I’d say software support on Linux is at least as good as on Windows, probably a bit better.
A lot of advanced analytical tools in biotech at least are developed to be compute cluster compatible, and thus work best on unix-like CLI, e.g. Linux (or Mac with a bit of tinkering)
I’m interested but don’t know enough to understand that answer.
If stuff is designed for big servers that run Linux, it’s easier to get it to run on a desktop PC if the PC runs Linux too because then it’s the same thing except much less powerful.
Code and snippets to analyze data work well when you can send chunks of it to multiple servers (think analyzing the effect of weather patterns).
Since a lot of that stuff is running on Linux (similar to cloud computing) it makes sense that people that write function/scripts/utilities would already be comfortable in that environment and use it as their daily driver.
Would meteorologists be writing that stuff or just using it? I would have thought using, but not programming.
Not sure. Like any field I suspect there’s specialties including people who do research/modeling vs consuming that data and advising based on it.
They certainly do, at least to an extent. In many fields where you have to work with a lot of data people will use R or Python to handle/transform/perform calculations.
If you compare with excel or similar. They do not write excel the program. But there is a lot of tinkering with algorithms and functions to get the wanted results.
True. HPC definitely plays a big role in the field, and essentially all compute clusters run some sort of Linux distro. Even though clients that can also be run locally then often have Windows binaries too, I’d say software support on Linux is at least as good as on Windows, probably a bit better.
And here I was using windows in a VM to run rstudio 😪
Times have changed for sure. (Tho I haven’t used rstudio for many years and it may still be unsupported)
Rstudio works perfectly, it’s electron