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by peatmoss 2886 days ago
My guesses are that:

1. Integrating the development environment on their host PC (for example connecting RStudio in R's case, or connecting their web browser back to a server running in the VM in the case of Jupyter) is another set of skills to master.

2. Many data analyses are memory hungry unless you want to resort to coding practices that optimize for memory consumption. The overhead of running a VM is a bummer for some scientists.

3. Many scientists are not using Linux top-to-bottom, and therefore don't have a great way of virtualizing a platform that they are familiar with (e.g. Windows, macOS)

Can people think of others? I'm sure I'm missing some.

(EDIT: To be clear, I think VMs are a great path, but I do think there are some practical reasons why some scientists don't use them)
2 comments
hmaarrfk 2885 days ago
Often scientists are using hardware to acquire new data. The acquisition hardware might be on a PC that came installed from the manufacturer where you are told not to change anything.

Touching that PC, in anyway would be considered harmful to everybody using that specific piece of equipment.

Therefore, from the beginning of your acquisition, you are basically using a machine you don't control.

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pytyper2 2885 days ago
I think these and other issues can be solved with technical training.
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peatmoss 2885 days ago
Sure, they’re all mitigatable, but that technical training is competing with a lot of other considerations within the limited brainwidth of a scientist.

From the scientist’s perspective, a lot of this can start to feel like yak shaving. The opportunity costs are real.

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pytyper2 2879 days ago
Eh, maybe. Virtualbox is point and click at this point, and taken on in conjunction with their institutional IT departments as hopefully they do with all desktop point and click software, totally doable with 5-10 hours of training and some typed desk procedures. Learning new tools and workflow seems to be part of the job. As I type that I also thought of a different response from the perspective of a leader and software engineer, I did not type that response.
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