[Tdwg-phylo] Publishing a trees in RDF

[Hilmar Lapp]

On Oct 22, 2010, at 12:22 PM, William Piel wrote:

> We need to be okay with seeing a rich plethora of quick-and-dirty  
> efforts, each focusing on articulating/investigating sets of novel  
> ideas -- despite some obvious redundancy in some of the more general  
> functions.  And then periodically, someone's got to assemble the  
> best of these ideas into a robust, jack-of-all-trades, off-the-shelf  
> software package.


That sounds nice indeed, but frankly I've never seen it happen. The  
quick-and-dirty efforts that I have seen become standard parts of  
reusable and sustainable software have almost all started from their  
early beginnings as parts of reusable software. For a while rather  
experimental and unstable parts, obviously, but the future course was  
charted not as an afterthought.

Truth of the matter is that we're all scientists. No scientist is  
interested in, or gets promotion, scientific recognition, or  
publications from assembling entirely incompatible, mostly redundant  
except for a few features, quick-and-dirty pieces of software into  
some grand jack-of-all-trades software package.

My $0.02, from about 13 years of software engineering.

	-hilmar
-- 
===========================================================
: Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
===========================================================