Advogato blog for titus

Excerpts from Coders At Work: Peter Deutsch Interview

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:19:21 GMT

I've been reading Peter Seibel's excellent book, Coders at Work, which is a transcription of interviews with a dozen or so very well known and impactful programmers. After the first two interviews, I found myself itching to highlight certain sections, and then I thought, heck, why not post some of the bits I found most interesting? This is a book everyone should be aware of, and it's surprisingly readable. Highly recommended.

This is the second of my blog posts. The first contained excerpts from Seibel's interview with Joe Armstrong.

The excerpts below come from Seibel's interview with Peter Deutsch, who is (among many other things) the creator and long-time maintainer of Ghostscript.

My comments are labeled 'CTB'.

On programmers

Seibel: So is it OK for people who don't have a talent for systems-level thinking to work on smaller parts of software? Can you split the programmers and the architects? Or do you really want everyone who's working on systems-style software, since it is sort of fractal, to be able think in terms of systems?

Deutsch: ... But in terms of who should do software, I don't have a good flat answer that. I do know that the further down in the plumbing the software is, the more important it is that it be built by really good people. That's an elitist point of view, and I'm happy to hold it.

...

You know the old story about the telephone and the telephone operators? The story is, sometime fairly early in the adoption of the telephone, when it was clear that use of the telephone was just expanding at an incredible rate, more and more people were having to be hired to work as operators because we didn't have dial telephones. Someone extrapolated the growth rate and said "My God. By 20 or 30 years from now, every single person will have to be a telephone operator." Well, that's happened. I think something like that may be happening in some big areas of programming as well.

CTB: This seemed like interesting commentary on the increasing ... democratization? ... of computer use.

Fast, cheap, good -- pick any two.

Deutsch: ...The problem being the old saying in the business: "fast, cheap, good -- pick any two." If you build things fast and you have some way of building them inexpensively, it's very unlikely that they're going to be good. But this school of thought says you shouldn't expect software to last.

I think behind this perhaps is a mindset of software as expense vs software as capital asset. I'm very much in the software-as-capital-asset school. When I was working at ParcPlace and Adele Goldberg was out there evangelizing object-oriented design, part of the way we talked about objects and part of the way we advocated object-oriented languages and design to our customers and potential customers is to say, "Look, you should treat software as a capital asset."

And there is no such thing as a capital asset that doesn't require ongoing maintenance and investment. You should expect that there's going to be some cost associated with maintaining a growing library of reusable software. And that is going to complicate your accounting because it means you can't charge the cost of building a piece of software only to the project or the customer that's motivating the creation of that software at this time. You have to think of it the way you would think of a capital asset.

CTB: A really good perspective that's relevant to scientists' concerns about software and data.

On how software practice has (not) improved over the last 30 years

Seibel: So you don't believe the original object-reuse pitch quite as strongly now. Was there something wrong with the theory, or has it just not worked out for historical reasons?

Deutsch: Well, part of the reason that I don't call myself a computer scientists any more is that I've seen software practice over a period of just about 50 years and it basically hasn't improved tremendously in about the last 30 years.

If you look at programming languages I would make a strong case that programming languages have not improved qualitatively in the last 40 years. There is no programming language in use today that is qualitatively better than Simula-67. I know that sounds kind of funny, but I really mean it. Java is not that much better than Simula-67.

Seibel: Smalltalk?

Deutsch: Smalltalk is somewhat better than Simula-67. But Smalltalk as it exists today essentially existed in 1976. I'm not saying that today's languages aren't better than the languages that existed 30 years ago. The language that I do all of my programming in today, Python, is, I think, a lot better than anything that was available 30 years ago. I like it better than Smalltalk.

I use the word qualitatively very deliberately. Every programming language today that I can think of, that's in substantial use, has the concept of pointer. I don't know of any way to make software built using that fundamental concept qualitatively better.

CTB: Well, that's just a weird opinion in some ways. But interesting, especially since he has been around and active for so long, and his perspective is obviously not based in ignorance.

On temptation

Deutsch: Every now and then I feel a temptation to design a programming language but then I just lie down until it goes away. But if I were to give in to that temptation, it would have a pretty fundamental cleavage between a functional part that talked only about values and had no concept of pointer, and a different sphere of some kind that talked about patterns of sharing and reference and control.

More on Smalltalk and Python

Seibel: So, despite it not being qualitatively better than Smalltalk, you still like Python better.

Deutsch: I do. There are several reasons. With Python there's a very clear story of what is a program and what it means to run a program and what it means to be part of a program. There's a concept of module, and modules declare basically what information they need from other modules. So it's possible to develop a module or a group of modules and share them with other people and those other people can come along and look at those modules and know pretty much exactly what they depend on and know what their boundaries are.

...

I've talked with the few of my buddies that are still at VisualWorks about open-sourcing the object engine, the just-in-time code generator, which, even though I wrote it, I still think is better than a lot of what's out there. Gosh, here we have Smalltalk, which has this really great code-generation machinery, which is now very mature -- it's about 20 years old and it's extremely reliable. It's a relatively simple, relatively retargetable, quite efficient just-in-time code generator that's designed to work really well with non type-declared languages. On the other hand, here's Python, which is this wonderful language with these wonderful libraries and a slow-as-mud implementation. Wouldn't it be nice if we could bring the two together?

(I'm a bit fixated on Python. OK?)

Deutsch: ... But that brings me to the other half, the other reason I like Python syntax better, which is that Lisp is lexically pretty monotonous.

Seibel: I think Larry Wall described it as a bowl of oatmeal with fingernail clippings in it.

Deutsch: Well, my description of Perl is something that looks like it came out of the wrong end of a dog. I think Larry Wall has a lot of nerve talking about language design -- Perl is an abomination as a language. But let's not go there.

CTB: heh.

Excerpts from Coders At Work: Joe Armstrong Interview

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:11:16 GMT

This is the first in what I expect to be a dozen or so blog posts, time permitting.

The excerpts below come from Seibel's interview with Joe Armstrong, the inventer of Erlang.

My comments are labeled 'CTB'.

On learning to program

Seibel: How did you learn to program? When did it all start?

Armstrong: When I was at school. I was born in 1950 so there weren't many computers around then. The final year of school, I suppose I must have been 17, the local council had a mainframe computer -- probably an IBM. We could write Fortran on it. It was the usual thing -- you wrote your programs on coding sheets and you sent them off. A week later the coding sheets and the punch cards came back and you had to approve them. But the people who made the punch cards would make mistakes. So it might go backwards and forwards one or two times. And then it would finally go to the computer center.

Then it went to the computer center and came back and the Fortran compilter had stopped at the first syntactic error in the program. It didn't even process the remainder of the program. It was something like three months to run your first program. I learned then, instead of sending one program you had to develop every single subroutine in parallel and sned the lot. I think I wrote a little program to dispay a chess board -- it would plot a chess board on the printer. But I had to write all the subroutines as parallel tasks because the turnaround time was so appallingly bad.

CTB: I think it's fascinating to interpret this statement in light of Erlang's pattern of small components, working in parallel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language). Did Armstrong shape his mental architecture in this pattern from the early mainframe days, and then translate that over to programming design? Also, this made me think about unit testing in a whole new way.

On modern gizmos like "hierarchical file systems", and productivity

Armstrong: The funny thing is, thinking back, I don't think all of these modern gizmos actually make you any more productive. Hierarchical file systems -- how do they make you more productive? Most of software development goes on in your head anyway. I think having worked with that simpler system imposes a kind of disciplined way of thinking. If you haven't got a directory system and you have to put all the files in one directory, you have to be fairly disciplined. If you haven't got a revision control system, you have to be fairly disciplined. Given that you apply that discipline to what you're doing it doesn't seem to me to be any better to have hierarchical file systems and revision control. They don't solve the fundamental problem of solving your problem. They probably make it easier for groups of people to work together. For individuals I don't see any difference.

CTB: If your tools require you to be as good as Joe Armstrong in order to get things done, that's probably not a generalizable solution...

On calling out to other languages, and Domain Specific Lanaguages

Seibel: So if you were writing a big image processing work-flow system, then would you write the actual image transformation in some other language?

Armstrong: I'd write them in C or assembler or something. Or I might actually write them in a dialect of Erlang and then cross-compile the Erlang to C. Make a dialect - this kind of domain-specific language kind of idea. Or I might write Erlang programs which generate C programs rather than writing the C programs by hand. But the target language would be C or assembler or something. Whether I wrote them by hand or generated them would be the interesting question. I'm tending toward automatically generating C rather than writing it by hand because it's just easier.

CTB: heh. So, I'd just generate C automatically from a dialect of Erlang...

On debugging

Seibel: What are the techniques that you use there? Print statements?

Armstrong. Print statements. The great gods of programming said, "Thou shall put printf statements in your program at the point where yout hink it's gone wrong, recompile, and run it.

Then there's -- I don't know if I read it somewhere or if I invented it myself -- Joe's Law of Debugging, which is that all errors will be plus/minus three statements of the place you last changed the program.

CTB: one surprising commonality amongst many of the interviews thus far is the lack of use (or disdain for) debuggers. Almost everyone trots out print statements!

PyCon 2013 and Codes of Conduct, more generally

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 19:09:38 GMT

The tech community is messed up in da head, yo.

Several times since Steve Holden's I'm Sorry post I've written long blog posts about my own views on codes of conduct and professional behavior, including the views informed by some of my own extraordinarily embarrassing transgressions. I never felt that the end result had much to add to the conversation so I never posted any of 'em. Plus, they were really embarrassing transgressions.

If you want to know, until last week, I was fairly publicly on the fence about the proposed Python Software Foundation code of conduct (which is not yet public, but is based on the Ubuntu CoC, I think) because I was worried about CoCs being used to whack people inappropriately, due to nonspecificity and other things.

Three things happened at PyCon 2013 that made me decide to (a) change my mind and (b) post this short note saying so.

First, I came to PyCon with two women colleagues, one of whom was harassed nearly constantly by men, albeit on a low level. Both of them are friendly people who are willing to engage at both a personal and a technical level with others, and apparently that signals to some that they can now feel free to comment on "hotness", proposition them, and otherwise act like 14 year old guys. As one friend said, (paraphrased) "I'd be more flattered that they seem to want to sleep with me, if they'd indicated any interest in me as a human being -- you know, asked me why I was at PyCon, what I did, what I worked on, what I thought about things. But they didn't." (Honestly, if I were to judge by that reported set of interactions, any genetic component to such behavior would be weeded out in approximately one generation, 'cause such guys would only be able to reproduce through anonymous donations to sperm banks.)

Second, at an event for a subcommunity that I help not run, bad shit happened. At the same event, derogatory and not-fun sexist remarks were made, publicly and loudly, about a presenter. This made the main organizer for that event feel horrible, and put a damper on the whole event.

Third, this happened. As with #2, I found PyCon's response perfectly appropriate, which makes me much happier about the way PyCon specifically and the PSF in general are likely to enforce any code of conduct in the future. As for the person who posted Twitter pics identifying the men she felt were being sexist, I am not very upset by her actions, because she is not an official representative of PyCon or the PSF, and she did not post anonymously, so she is taking responsibility for her actions -- unlike the people harassing Jesse Noller for doing his effin' job. I do reject the notion that Adria speaks for me in the particulars, and I would guess that her claim to speak for all future women is similarly rejected by many women. Again, PyCon is not responsible for her tweet or her picture, and they should not be held accountable in any way for it; that's her personal action. (I'm more upset by the company that took this to the extent of actually firing someone over it, and I'm really glad my employer (Michigan State University) has rules, procedures, and formal hearings -- if they fire me, it will be after a certain amount of due process and not due to what is presumably Internet hearsay.)

In the end, the latter two incidents are completely overshadowed by the first, though. I'm not the parent or guardian of either of my colleagues, and I suspect they would similarly reject the idea that I speak for either of them - they're both perfectly capable of telling people what they think, frankly (and I would love to be an audience for some of those conversations). But, as both a visible member of the Python community and as the father of two small girls, I am appalled at the second-hand reports of male behavior. I'm particularly appalled at the systemic low-level harassment that seems to be considered normal behavior by some. It's not cool, it's not fun, and it doesn't even have the dubious virtue of being effective.

In summary,

GOOD JOB, PYCON. The way the incidents were officially handled was really well done and speaks well of the people we have chosen to run PyCon.
We need codes of conduct because they provide some minimal guidelines for people that (apparently) need 'em, because they can't figure out how to tie their own shoelaces without such guidelines.
As a community, we need to change the way we treat women, because my daughters will TASER YOU ALL INTO OBLIVION in 10-20 years if we don't.

--titus

p.s. Sorry, no comments. Go blog 'em and I'll link to the blog posts, just send them to @ctitusbrown on Twitter.

My 2013 PyCon talk: Awesome Big Data Algorithms

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 19:09:59 GMT

Schedule link

Description

Random algorithms and probabilistic data structures are algorithmically efficient and can provide shockingly good practical results. I will give a practical introduction, with live demos and bad jokes, to this fascinating algorithmic niche. I will conclude with some discussions of how our group has applied this to large sequencing data sets (although this will not be the focus of the talk).

Abstract:

I propose to start with Python implementations of most of the DS & A mentioned in this excellent blog post:

http://highlyscalable.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/probabilistic-structures-web-analytics-data-mining/

and also discuss skip lists and any other random algorithms that catch my fancy. I'll put everything together in an IPython notebook and add visualizations as appropriate.

I'll finish with some discussion of how we've put these approaches to work in my lab's research, which focuses on compressive approaches to large data sets (and is regularly featured in my Python-ic blog, http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/).

Misc talk links

Slides

Github repo with IPython Notebooks in it

(I'll put the video link in here when it's available.)

Overviews and linkfoo

Wikipedia's category page for Probabilistic Data Structures

The Highly Scalable Blog on Probabilistic Data Structures for Web Analytics and Data Mining

Specific References

SkipLists:

skiplist IPython Notebook

Wikipedia page on SkipLists

John Shipman's excellent writeup

William Pugh's original article

The HackerNews (oops!) reference for my reddit-attributed quote about putting a gun to someone's head and asking them to write a log-time algorithm for storing stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2670632

HyperLogLog:

coinflips IPython Notebook

HyperLogLog counter IPython Notebook

Aggregate Knowledge's EXCELLENT blog post on HyperLogLog. The section on Big Pattern Observables is truly fantastic :)

Flajolet et al. is the original paper. It gets a bit technical in the middle but the discussions are great.

Nick Johnson's blog post on cardinality estimation

MetaMarkets' blog post on cardinality counting

More High Scalability blog posts, this one by Matt Abrams

The obligatory Stack Overflow Q&A

Vasily Evseenko's git repo https://github.com/svpcom/hyperloglog, forked from Nelson Goncalves's git repo, https://github.com/goncalvesnelson/Log-Log-Sketch, served as the source for my IPython Notebook.

Bloom Filters:

Bloom filter notebook

The Wikipedia page is pretty good.

Everything I know about Bloom filters comes from my research.

I briefly mentioned the CountMin Sketch, which is an extension of the basic Bloom filter approach, for counting frequency distributions of objects.

Other nifty things to look at

Quotient filters

Rapidly-exploring random trees

Random binary trees

Treaps

StackOverflow question on Bloom-filter like structures that go the other way

A survey of probabilistic data structures

K-Minimum Values over at Aggregate Knowledge again

Set operations on HyperLogLog counters, again over at Aggregate Knowledge.

Using SkipLists to calculate an efficient running median

My research

A fairly readable (?) grant on Big Data in sequencing data sets

A less readable ;) grant on "infinite assembly"

In addition to our published paper on using Bloom filters to store de Bruijn graphs, you might be interested in:

Our preprint on streaming lossy compression of sequencing data (aka Digital Normalization)

Our use of these techniques to assemble the heck out of large metagenomic data from soil

A chapter on optimizing our khmer software.

--titus

Communicating programming practice with screencasts

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 03:08:36 GMT

One of the things that I have struggled with over the years is how to teach people how to actually program -- by this I mean the minute-to-minute process and techniques of generating code, more so than syntax and data structures and algorithms. This is generally not taught explicitly in college: most undergraduate students pick it up in the process of doing homeworks, by working with other people, observing TAs, and evolving their own practice. Most science graduate students never take a formal course in programming or software development, as far as I can tell, so they pick it up haphazardly from their colleagues. Open source hackers may get their practice from sprints, but usually by the time you get to a sprint you are already wedged fairly far into your own set of habits.

Despite this lack of explicit teaching, I think it's clear that programming practice is really important. I and the other Linux/UNIX geeks I know all have a fairly small set of basic approaches -- command-line driven, mostly emacs or vi, with lots of automation at the shell -- that we apply to all of our problems, and it is all pretty optimized for the tools and tasks we have. I would be hard pressed to imagine a significantly more efficient and effective set of practices (which just tells me that there is probably something much better, but it's far away from my current practices :).

Now that I'm a professional educator, I'd like to teach this, because what I see students doing is so darned inefficient by comparison. I regularly watch students struggle with the mouse to switch between windows, copy and paste by selecting or dragging, and otherwise completely fail to make use of keyboard shortcuts. I see a lot of code being built from scratch by guess-work, without lots of Google-fu or copy/pasting and editing. Version control isn't integrated into their minute-by-minute process. Testing? Hah. We don't even teach automated testing here at MSU. It's an understatement to say that using all of these techniques together is a conceptual leap that many students seem ill-prepared to make.

Last term I co-taught an intro graduate course in computation for evolutionary biologists using IPython Notebook running in the cloud, and I made extensive use of screencasts as a way to show the students how I worked and how I thought. It went pretty well -- several students told me that they really appreciated being able to see what I was doing and hear why I was doing it, and being able to pause and rewind was very helpful when they ran into trouble.

So this term, for my database-backed Web development course, I decided to post videos of the homework solutions for the second homework, which is part of a whole-term class project to build a distributed peer-to-peer liquor cabinet and party planning Web site. (Hey, you gotta teach 'em somehow, right?)

I posted the example solutions as a github branch as well as videos showing me solving each of the sub problems in real time, with discussion:

HW 2.1 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2img0wKdokA

HW 2.2 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQU4qImY9VM

HW 2.3 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqL18Ip2wws

HW 2.4 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iOITFHrqmA

HW 2.5 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ea5yxRCKKw

HW 2.6 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k8pnl2SgVI

I think the videos are decent screencasts, and by breaking them down this way I made it possible for students to look only at the section they had questions about. Each screencasts is 5-10 minutes total, and now I can use them for other classes, too.

So far so good, and I doubt many students have spent much time looking at them, but maybe some will. We'll have to see if my contentment in having produced them matches their actual utility in the class :).

But then something entertaining happened. Greg Wilson is always bugging us (where "us" means pretty much anyone whose e-mail inbox he has access to) about developing hands-on examples that we can use in Software Carpentry, so I sent these videos to the SWC 'tutors' mailing list with a note that I'd love help writing better homeworks. And within an hour or so, I got back two nice polite e-mails from other members of the list, offering better *solutions. One was about HW 2.1 --

System Message: WARNING/2 (/Users/t/dev/blog-final/src/communicating-programming-practice.rst, line 88); backlink

Inline emphasis start-string without end-string.

It might be safer to .lstrip() the line before checking for comments (to allow indented comments). Also, not line[0].strip() doesn't test for lines with only white space. it tests for lines that have white space as the first character. 'not line.strip()[0]' would be all white space... That would also make 'not line' redundant.

I also got a more general offer from someone else to peer review my homework solutions, and chastising me for using

fp = open(filename)
try:
  ... do stuff ...
finally:
  fp.close()

instead of

with open(filename) as fp:
   ... do stuff

heh.

I find this little episode very entertaining. I love the notion that other people (at least one is another professor) had the spare time to watch the videos and then critique what I'd done and then send me the critique; I also like the point that the quest for perfect code is ongoing. I am particularly entertained by the fact that they are both right, and that my explanation of my code was in some cases facile, shallow, and somewhat wrong (although not significantly enough to make me redo the videos -- the perfect is the enemy of the good enough!)

And, finally, although no feedback spoke directly to this, I am in love with the notion that we can convey effective practice through video. I think this episode is a great indication that if we could get students to record themselves working through problems, we could learn how they are responding to our instruction and start to develop a deeper understanding of the traps for the novice that lie within our current programming processes.

--titus

Adding disqus, Google Analytics, and github edit links to ReadTheDocs sites

Sun, 4 Nov 2012 18:10:11 GMT

Inspired by the awesomeness of disqus on my other sites, I wanted to make it possible to enable disqus on my sites on ReadTheDocs. A bit of googling led me to Mikko Ohtamaa's excellent work on the Plone documentation, where a blinding flash of awesomeness hit me and I realized that github had, over the past year, nicely integrated online editing of source, together with pull requests.

This meant that I could now give potential contributors completely command-line-free edit ability for my documentation sites, together with single-click approval of edits, and automated insta-updating of the ReadTheDocs site. Plus disqus commenting. And Google Analytics.

I just had to have it.

Voila.

Basically, I took Mikko's awesomeness, combined it with some disqus hackery, refactored a few times, and, well, posted it.

The source is here.

Two things --

I could some JS help disabling the 'Edit this document!' stuff if the 'github_base_account' variable isn't set in page.html'. Anyone? See line 105 of page.html. You can edit online by hitting 'e' :).

It would be nice to be able to configure disqus, Google Analytics, and github editing in conf.py, but I wasn't able to figure out how to pass variables into Jinja2 from conf.py. It's probably really easy.

But otherwise it all works nicely.

Enjoy! And thanks to Mikko, as well as Eric Holscher and the RTD team, and github, for making this all so frickin' easy.

--titus

PyCon 2013 talks I really don't want to see

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:10:58 GMT

There's been a lot of discussion about PyCon talks that we do want to see. Here's a brief list of those I don't want to see, for those of you considering a submission -- in no particular order.

1001 Mocking Frameworks - a comparison and overview
Long Live Twill
Zope vs. Django - why Zope was right all along
Why We Need More Men in Python - a Diversity discussion
Centralized Version Control - it's the future
Guido van Rossum on Python 4k - it's the future
Running Python under Windows on my Superboard II
Lists - way more useful than you ever thought
What the Python Community Can Learn from Java
Solving Easy Problems - my very own customized approaches

Any other ideas? Add 'em or send me links :)

--titus

Welcome to my new blog!

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 06:10:26 GMT

I've just moved my blog over to Pelican, a static blog generator that takes in reStructuredText and spits out, well, this! I'm now using Disqus for commenting, too.

The main motivations for the move (apart from slightly better theming) were to escape dynamic-blog-land in favor of static-blog-land, while enabling a better commenting setup. Pelican+disqus looked like a great solution; we'll see how it goes!

One note -- rather than hack and slash my way through disqus's commenting system upload fail, I just attached all of the comments as "legacy comments" on old blog entries. Yeah, it sucks, sorry.

--titus

Some early experience in teaching using ipython notebook

Fri, 8 Jun 2012 19:09:06 GMT

As part of the 2012 Analyzing Next-Generation Sequencing Data course, I've been trying out ipython notebook for the tutorials.

In previous years, our tutorials all looked like this: Short read assembly with Velvet -- basically, reStructuredText files integrated with Sphinx. This had a lot of advantages, including Googleability and simplicity; but it also meant that students spent a lot of time copying and pasting commands.

This year, I tried mixing things up with some ipython notebook, using pre-written notebooks -- see for example a static view of the BLAST notebook. The notebooks are sourced at https://github.com/ngs-docs/ngs-notebooks, and can be automatically updated and placed on an EC2 instance for the students to run. The idea is that the students can simply shift-ENTER through the notebooks; shell commands can easily be run with '!', and we can integrate in python code that graphs and explores the outputs.

Once we got past the basic teething pains of badly written notebooks, broken delivery mechanisms, proper ipython parameters, etc., things seemed to work really well. It's been great to be able to add code, annotate code, and graph stuff interactively!

Along the way, though, a few points have emerged.

First, ipython notebook adds a little bit of confusion to the process. Even though it's pretty simple, when you're throwing it in on top of UNIX, EC2, bioinformatics, and Python, people's minds tend to boggle.

For this reason, it's not yet clear how good an addition ipynb is to the course. We can't get away with replacing the shell with ipynb, for a variety of reasons; so it represents an extra cognitive burden. I think for an entire term course it will be an unambiguous win, but for an intensive workshop it may be one thing too many.

I should have a better feeling for this next week.

Second, in practice, ipython notebooks need to be written so that they can be executed multiple times on the same machine. Workshop attendees start out very confused about the order of commands vs the order of execution, and even though ipynb makes this relatively simple, if they get into trouble it is nice to be able to tell them to just rerun the entire notebook. So the notebook commands have to be designed this way -- for one example, if you're copying a file, make sure to use 'cp -f' so that it doesn't ask if the file needs to be copied again.

Third, in practice, ipython notebooks cannot contain long commands. If the entire notebook can't be re-run in about 1 minute, then it's too long. This became really clear with Oases and Trinity, where Oases could easily be run on a small data set in about 1-2 minutes, while Trinity took an hour or more. Neither people nor browsers handle that well. Moreover, if you accidentally run the time-consuming task twice, you're stuck waiting for it to finish, and it's annoying and confusing to put multi-execution guards on tasks.

This point is a known challenge with ipython notebook, of course; I've been talking with Fernando and Brian, among others, about how to deal with long running tasks. I'm converging to the idea that long-running tasks should be run at the command line (maybe using 'make' or something better?) and then ipython notebook can be used for data analysis leading to summaries and/or visualization.

Fourth, ipython notebooks are a bit difficult to share in static form, which makes the site less useful. Right now I've been printing to HTML and then serving that HTML up statically, which is slow and not all that satisfying. There are probably easy solutions for this but I haven't invested in them ;).

---

In spite of these teething pains, feedback surrounding ipynb has been reasonably positive. Remember, these are biologists who may never have done any previous shell commands or programming, and we are throwing a lot at them; but overall the basic concepts of ipynb are simple, and they recognize that. Moreover, ipython notebook has enabled extra flexibility in what we present and make possible for them to do, and they seem to see and appreciate that.

The good news is that we figured all this out in the first week, and I still have a whole week with the guinea pigs, ahem, course attendees, under my thumb. We'll see how it goes!

--titus

p.s. Totally jonesing for a portfolio system that lets me specify a machine config, then with a single click spawns the machine, configures it, sucks down a bunch of ipython notebooks, and points me at the first one!

Why I don't really practice open science

Sun, 8 Apr 2012 01:09:13 GMT

I'm a pretty big advocate of anything open -- open source, open access, and open science, in particular. I always have been. And now that I'm a professor, I've been trying to figure out how to actually practice open science effectively

What is open science? Well, I think of it as talking regularly about my unpublished research on the Internet, generally in my blog or on some other persistent, explicitly public forum. It should be done regularly, and it should be done with a certain amount of depth or self-reflection. (See, for example, the wunnerful Rosie Redfield and Nature's commentary on her blogging of the arsenic debacle & tests thereof.)

Most of my cool, sexy bloggable work is in bioinformatics; I do have a wet lab, and we're starting to get some neat stuff out of that (incl. both some ascidian evo-devo and some chick transcriptomics) but that's not as mature as the computational stuff I'm doing. And, as you know if you've seen any of my recent posts on this, I'm pretty bullish about the computational work we've been doing: the de novo assembly sequence foo is, frankly, super awesome and seems to solve most of the scaling problems we face in short-read assembly. And it provides a path to solving the problems that it doesn't outright solve. (I'm talking about partitioning and digital normalization.)

While I think we're doing awesome work, I've been uncharacteristically (for me) shy about proselytizing it prior to having papers ready. I occasionally reference it on mailing lists, or in blog posts, or on twitter, but the most I've talked about the details has been in talks -- and I've rarely posted those talks online. When I have, I don't point out the nifty awesomeness in the talks, either, which of course means it goes mostly unnoticed. This seems to be at odds with my oft-loudly stated position that open-everything is the way to go. What's going on?? That's what this blog post is about. I think it sheds some interesting light on how science is actually practiced, and why completely open science might waste a lot of people's time.

I'd like to dedicate this blog post to Greg Wilson. He and I chat irregularly about research, and he's always seemed interested in what I'm doing but is stymied because I don't talk about it much in public venues. And he's been a bit curious about why. Which made me curious about why. Which led to this blog post, explaining why I think why. (I've had it written for a few months, but was waiting until I posted diginorm.)

For the past two years or so, I've been unusually focused on the problem of putting together vast amounts of data -- the problem of de novo assembly of short-read sequences. This is because I work on unusual critters -- soil microbes & non-model animals -- that nobody has sequenced before, and so we can't make use of prior work. We're working in two fields primarily, metagenomics (sampling populations of wild microbes) and mRNAseq (quantitative sequencing of transcriptomes, mostly from non-model organisms).

The problems in this area are manifold, but basically boil down to two linked issues: vast underlying diversity, and dealing with the even vaster amounts of sequence necessary to thoroughly sample this diversity. There's lots of biology motivating this, but the computational issues are, to first order, dominant: we can generate more sequence than we can assemble. This is the problem that we've basically solved.

A rough timeline of our work is:

mid/late 2009: Likit, a graduate student in my lab, points out that we're getting way better gene models from assembly of chick mRNAseq than from reference-based approaches. Motivates interest in assembly.

mid/late 2009: our lamprey collaborators deliver vast amounts of lamprey mRNAseq to us. Reference genome sucks. Motivates interest in assembly.

mid/late 2009: the JGI starts delivering ridiculous amount of soil sequencing data to us (specifically, Adina). We do everything possible to avoid assembly.

early 2010: we realize that the least insane approach to analyzing soil sequencing data relies on assembly.

early 2010: Qingpeng, a graduate student, convinces me that existing software for counting k-mers (tallymer, specifically) doesn't scale to samples with 20 or 30 billion unique k-mers. (He does this by repeatedly crashing our lab servers.)

mid-2010: a computational cabal within the lab (Jason, Adina, Rose) figures out how to count k-mers really efficiently, using a CountMin Sketch data structure (which we reinvent, BTW, but eventually figure out isn't novel. o well). We implement this in khmer. (see k-mer filtering)

mid-2010: We use khmer to figure out just how much Illumina sequence sucks. (see Illumina read phenomenology)

mid-2010: Arend joins our computational cabal, bringing detailed and random knowledge of graph theory with him. We invent an actually novel use of Bloom filters for storing de Bruijn graphs. (blog post) The idea of partitioning large metagenomic data sets into (disconnected) components is born. (Not novel, as it turns out -- see MetaVelvet and MetaIDBA.)

late 2010: Adina and Rose figure out that Illumina suckage prevents us from actually getting this to work.

first half of 2011: Spent figuring out capacity of de Bruijn graph representation (Jason/Arend) and the right parameters to actually de-suckify large Illumina data sets (Adina). We slowly progress towards actually being able to partition large metagenomic data sets reliably. A friend browbeats me into applying the same technique to his ugly genomic data set, which magically seems to solve his assembly problems.

fall 2011: the idea of digital normalization is born: throwing away redundant data FTW. Early results are very promising (we throw away 95% of data, get identical assembly) but it doesn't scale assembly as well as I'd hoped.

October 2011: JGI talk at the metagenome informatics workshop - SLYT, where we present our ideas of partitioning and digital normalization, together, for the first time. We point out that this potentially solves all the scaling problems.

November 2011: We figure out the right parameters for digital normalization, turning up the awesomeness level dramatically.

through present: focus on actually writing this stuff up. See: de Bruijn graph preprint; digital normalization preprint.

If you read this timeline (yeah, I know it's long, just skim) and look at the dates of "public disclosure", there's a 12-14 month gap between talking about k-mer counting (July 2010) and partitioning/etc (Oct 2011, metagenome informatics talk). And then there's another several-month gap before I really talk about digital normalization as a good solution (basically, mid/late January 2012).

Why??

I was really freakin' busy actually getting the stuff to work, not to mention teaching, traveling, and every now and then actually being at home.
I was definitely worried about "theft" of ideas. Looking back, this seems a mite ridiculous, but: I'm junior faculty in a fast-moving field. Eeek! I also have a duty to my grads and postdocs to get them published, which wouldn't be helped by being "scooped".
We kept on coming up with new solutions and approaches! Digital normalization didn't exist until August 2011, for example; appropriate de-suckifying of Illumina data took until April or May of 2011; and proving that it all worked was, frankly, quite tough and took until October. (More on this below.)
The code wasn't ready to use, and we hadn't worked out all the right parameters, and I wasn't ready to do the support necessary to address lots of people using the software.

All of these things meant I didn't talk about things openly on my blog. Is this me falling short of "open science" ideals??

In my defense, on the "open science" side:

I gave plenty of invited talks in this period, including a few (one at JGI and one at UMD CBCB) attended by experts who certainly understood everything I was saying, probably better than me.

I posted some of these talks on slideshare.

all of our software development has been done on github, under github.com/ctb/khmer/. It's all open source, available, etc.

...but these are sad excuses for open science. None of these activities really disseminated my research openly. Why?

Well, invited talks by junior faculty like me are largely attended out of curiosity and habit, rather than out of a burning desire to understand what they're doing; odds are, the faculty in question hasn't done anything particularly neat, because if they had, they'd be well known/senior, right? And who the heck goes through other people's random presentations on slideshare? So that's not really dissemination, especially when the talks are given to an in group already.

What about the source code? The "but all my source code is available" dodge is particularly pernicious. Nobody, but nobody, looks at other people's source code in science, unless it's (a) been released, (b) been documented, and (c) claims to solve YOUR EXACT ACTUAL PROBLEM RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW. The idea that someone is going to come along and swoop your awesome solution out of your repository seems to me to be ridiculous; you'd be lucky to be that relevant, frankly.

So I don't think any of that is a good way to disseminate what you've done. It's necessary for science, but it's not at all sufficient.

What do I think is sufficient for dissemination? In my case, how do you build solutions and write software that actually has an impact, either on the way people think or (even better) on actual practice? And is it compatible with open science?

Write effective solutions to common problems. The code doesn't have to be pretty or even work all that well, but it needs to work well enough to run and solve a common problem.
Make your software available. Duh. It doesn't have to be open source, as far as I can tell; I think it should be, but plenty of people have restrictive licenses on their code and software, and it gets used.
Write about it in an open setting. Blogs and mailing lists are ok; SeqAnswers is probably a good place for my field; but honestly, you've got to write it all down in a nice, coherent, well-thought out body of text. And if you're doing that? You might as well publish it. Here is where Open Access really helps, because The Google will make it possible for people to find it, read it, and then go out and find your software.

The interesting thing about this list is that in addition to all the less-than-salutary reasons (given above) for not blogging more regularly about our stuff, I had one very good reason for not doing so.

It's a combination of #1 and #3.

You see, until near to the metagenome informatics meeting, I didn't know if partitioning or digital normalization really worked. We had really good indications that partitioning worked, but it was never solid enough for me to push it strongly as an actual solution to big data problems. And digital normalization made so much sense that it almost had to work, but, um, proving it was a different problem. Only in October did we do a bunch of cross-validation that basically convinced me that partitioning worked really well, and only in November did we figure out how awesome digital normalization was.

So we thought we had solutions, but we weren't sure they were effective, and we sure didn't have it neatly wrapped in a bow for other people to use. So #1 wasn't satisfied.

And, once we did have it working, we started to put a lot of energy into demonstrating that it worked and writing it up for publication -- #3 -- which took a few months.

In fact, I would actually argue that before October 2011, we could have wasted people's time by pushing our solutions out for general use when we basically didn't know if they worked well. Again, we thought they did, but we didn't really know.

This is a conundrum for open science: how do you know that someone else's work is worth your attention? Research is really hard, and it may take months or years to nail down all the details; do you really want to invest significant time or effort in someone else's research before that's done? And when they are done -- well, that's when they submit it for publication, so you might as well just read that first!

This is basically the format for open science I'm evolving. I'll blog as I see fit, I'll post code and interact with people that I know who need solutions, but I will wait until we have written a paper to really open up about what we're doing. A big part of that is trying to only push solid science, such that I don't waste other people's time, energy, and attention.

So: I'm planning to continue to post all my senior-author papers to arXiv just before their first submission. The papers will come with open source and the full set of data necessary to recapitulate our results. And I'll blog about the papers, and the code, and the work, and try to convince people that it's nifty and awesome and solves some useful problems, or addresses cool science. But I don't see any much point in broadly discussing my stuff before a preprint is available.

Is this open science? I don't really think so. I'd really like to talk more openly about our actual research, but for all the reasons above, it doesn't seem like a good idea. So I'll stick to trying to give presentations on our stuff at conferences, and maybe posting the presentations to slideshare when I think of it, and interacting with people privately where I can understand what problems they're running into.

What I'm doing is more about open access than open science: people won't find out details of our work until I think it's ready for publication, but they also won't have to wait for the review process to finish. While I'm not a huge fan of the way peer review is done, I accept it as a necessary evil for getting my papers into a journal. By the time I submit a paper, I'll be prepared to argue, confidently and with actual evidence, that the approach is sound. If the reviewers disagree with me and find an actual mistake, I'll fix the paper and apologize profusely & publicly; if reviewers just want more experiments done to round out the story, I'll do 'em, but it's easy to argue that additional experiments generally don't detract from the paper unless they discover flaws (see above, re "apologize"). The main thing reviewers seem to care about is softening grandiose claims, anyway; this can be dealt with by (a) not making them and (b) sending to impact-oblivious journals like PLoS One. I see no problem with posting the paper, in any of these circumstances.

Maybe I'm wrong; experience will tell if this is a good idea. It'll be interesting to see where I am once we get these papers out... which may take a year or two, given all the stuff we are writing up.

I've also come to realize that most people don't have the time or (mental) energy to spare to really come to grips with other people's research. We were doing some pretty weird stuff (sketch graph representations? streaming sketch algorithms for throwing away data?), and I don't have a prior body of work in this area; most people probably wouldn't be able to guess at whether I was a quack without really reading through my code and presentations, and understanding it in depth. That takes a lot of effort. And most people don't really understand the underlying issues anyway; those who do probably care about them sufficiently to have their own research ideas and are pursuing them instead, and don't have time to understand mine. The rest just want a solution that runs and isn't obviously wrong.

In the medium term, the best I can hope for is that preprints and blog posts will spur people to either use our software and approaches, or that -- even better -- they will come up with nifty new approaches that solve the problems in some new way that I'd never have thought of. And then I can read their work and build on their ideas. This is what we should strive for in science: the shortest round trip between solid scientific inspiration in different labs. This does not necessarily mean open notebooks.

Overall, it's been an interesting personal journey from "blind optimism" about openness to a more, ahem, "nuanced" set of thoughts (i.e., I was wrong before :). I'd be interested to hear what other people have to say... drop me a note or make a comment.

--titus

p.s. I recognize that it's too early to really defend the claim that our stuff provides a broad set of solutions. That's not up to me to say, for one thing. For another, it'll take years to prove out. So I'm really talking about the hypothetical solution where it is widely useful in practice, and how that intersects with open science goals & practice.

Advogato blog for titus

Excerpts from Coders At Work: Peter Deutsch Interview

On programmers

Fast, cheap, good -- pick any two.

On how software practice has (not) improved over the last 30 years

On temptation

More on Smalltalk and Python

(I'm a bit fixated on Python. OK?)

Excerpts from Coders At Work: Joe Armstrong Interview

On learning to program

On modern gizmos like "hierarchical file systems", and productivity

On calling out to other languages, and Domain Specific Lanaguages

On debugging

PyCon 2013 and Codes of Conduct, more generally

My 2013 PyCon talk: Awesome Big Data Algorithms

Misc talk links

Overviews and linkfoo

Specific References

SkipLists:

HyperLogLog:

Bloom Filters:

Other nifty things to look at

My research

Communicating programming practice with screencasts

Adding disqus, Google Analytics, and github edit links to ReadTheDocs sites

PyCon 2013 talks I really don't want to see

Welcome to my new blog!

Some early experience in teaching using ipython notebook

Why I don't *really* practice open science

Why I don't really practice open science