Training wheels on a bike are actually all wrong. They encourage bad practice and do not develop the correct approach, making transition harder.
For those who are interested: To teach someone to ride a bike, first teach them to scoot and balance. Typically that involves putting the seat to a level where they can comfortably reach the floor, and taking the pedals off. Scoot and balance. Once that is picked up, add the pedals back in. Training wheels seem like a nice idea but are actually counterproductive. Now apply that to your software/scientific computing paradigm of choice. (Using the undo button as version control?) ..d Dr David Martin Lecturer in Bioinformatics College of Life Sciences University of Dundee ________________________________________ From: Discuss <[email protected]> on behalf of Michael J Jackson <[email protected]> Sent: 05 May 2016 10:02:05 To: Timothy Rice Cc: [email protected]; Dirk Eddelbuettel Subject: Re: [Discuss] Word and PowerPoint "all wrong"? Hi Timothy, Quoting Timothy Rice <[email protected]> on Thu, 5 May 2016 07:28:51 +1000: > Are training wheels on a bike "all wrong"? > > To a beginner, training wheels also seem to have points of superiority; yet > we expect that as time goes on, the novice will discard the training > wheels. This is both a display of increased skill, and a prerequisite for > using the bike more effectively overall. > > But maybe when even all the adults use training wheels too, and they can't > imagine a bike without training wheels, this state of affairs would hold > people back from using the bike to its full potential. It might even turn > out that anyone who does take the initiative of discarding training wheels > would seem like a freak who has to justify themselves to others. They might > find themselves responding to claims that training wheels aren't "all > wrong" ;) > > And, you know, one of the things I emphasise at the start when teaching > LaTeX is that it is contraindicated for small, uncomplicated projects that > don't have special typesetting requirements. If someone is just writing a > letter to their grandma, they might wish to stick with their conventional > word processor, it's no skin off my nose. > > However, one would hope that in academia, the researcher aspires to create > non-trivial documents; certainly many people who have tried writing a > thesis in Word later came to lament their choice. Yes, I'm one of them! > Are Word and PowerPoint "all wrong"? Maybe not. But should we be content > with software whose main claim to fame is that they're not all wrong and > they happen to be used by a lot of people who refuse to discard training > wheels? The "training wheels" analogy does not hold. Word and PowerPoint are not designed for beginners only. They are powerful document preparation tools in their own right. My point was that Word and PowerPoint are not "all wrong" nor are they "all right". They have strengths and weaknesses, as does LaTeX (great for formulae!). Statements that can be perceived as fundamentalist ("all wrong") or patronising ("training wheels") when promoting one tool over another does no favours and can be counter-productive. As an example, I've seen attendees at a workshop ask if they can hold Word docs under Git and, when told, "ideally you'd use plain-text documents to get the most benefit", switch off entirely as their community used Word, but when told "of course, you can put Word docs under Git", and having been shown this (including how to do a simple conflict resolution), brighten up again. I'd rather people be taught to appreciate and be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of all the tools they use, and, as Jan mentions, the technical debts they could incur. This includes the tools currently used by SWC (which, in future, people may wonder why we ever used some of them - a colleague recently railed against using a closed source platform like GitHub, for example) cheers, mike > Kind regards, > > > Tim > > [1] https://github.com/cryptarch/latex-novice.git > >> As one who writes everything in MarkDown by preference, are Word and >> PowerPoint "all wrong"? Yes, their binary formats don't play so well >> with revision control than plain-text formats such as MarkDown or >> LaTeX, for example (but sticking them under revision control is >> still of great benefit). In other ways they're superior: WYSIWYG >> editors, no compilation steps, PDF-generation from within the tool, >> and they're ubiquitous. Similarly, for some tasks they allow a user >> to "do more in less time with less pain" than the alternatives*. >> >> cheers, >> mike >> >> * Having spent more than the 5 minutes it should have taken >> yesterday trying (and failing even with Google's help) to put a >> hyperlink to a Wikipedia page with multiple underscores in a LaTeX >> document and have it clickable in the resulting PDF. ------------------------------------------------------------ Dr. Michael (Mike) Jackson [email protected] Software Architect Tel: +44 (0)131 650 5141 EPCC, The University of Edinburgh http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk Software Sustainability Institute http://www.software.ac.uk ------------------------------------------------------------ Dr. Michael (Mike) Jackson [email protected] Software Architect Tel: +44 (0)131 650 5141 EPCC, The University of Edinburgh http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk Software Sustainability Institute http://www.software.ac.uk -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org The University of Dundee is a registered Scottish Charity, No: SC015096 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
