[xte]

Did you ever tried org-mode with org-babel? If not only see few video about org-mode reproducible research / emacs on YT&c :-) in terms of reproducibility Nix{,OS} and Guix{,SD} offer really nice tools to achieve full-stack reproducibility without the need of publish multi-Mb/Gb archives, only a text file .nix or scheme can do the business.

Also ESS inside Emacs it's another nice working environment, perhaps is not as "natural at first impact" like a spreadsheet but I bet NO ONE after a week of (self) training will found spreadsheet better or even usable.

[babahoyo]

I think this is missing the forest for the trees. The audience for these tools is people who have never written in a text editor in their life! They literally might not even recognize that some fonts are fixed-width and not know what textedit is.

That is to say, emacs might be over-kill. But literate programming is a pretty powerful concept in general, and rmarkdown and Rstudio (along with simliar tools in Python, Julia, etc.) make this super easy, and I think its a great way to introduce people to programming.

Getting people to use Git is the fight worth having imo, but its still hard. I was talking to someone the other day who didn't like git because tough to have comments about the work: they didn't use code reviews on github to get consensus, just comments in the code.

Plus there is the whole data-management problem. Quilt, SQL connections, and DataDeps for Julia are good solutions, but there isn't a single one answer that we've coalesced behind.

These are all really tough problems. I'm actually really interested in MS's acquisition of github for this reason. Maybe they can put some money towards the obstacles that have prevented mass adoption of scripting and git.

[xte]

IMVHO anyone must know the tools of their trade (I do not know if this make sense in English, hope so, maybe also expressed as "the tools used for doing their job"). If today statistic is done with computers good computers tools must be known. Newcomers of course can't know by genetic, they have to learn and universities must teach them so...

Consider that org-mode itself was designed, written and still maintained by an astronomer, one of the most ancient and widespread completion framework for Emacs (Helm) was written and still maintained by a mounting guide that still be a mounting/climbing guide. Of course they are "exception" but they are simply people who encounter "the right tool" at a certain point in time and start to learn it.

On GitHub, for me as any proprietary platform should be ignored, at maximum used to share git repos, certainly not for PR&c that are proprietary unportable stuff. And that's another thing anyone that use a computer for more than play a game MUST know, from office guys with their email only on webmail and smartphones user with their "valuable" personal data (photos, video etc) to IT pro.