Comment by zahlman
11 hours ago
If they are not developers, it's the developer's responsibility to fix that. The developers have many options available for this.
11 hours ago
If they are not developers, it's the developer's responsibility to fix that. The developers have many options available for this.
You misunderstand. The physicists are developing their own software to analyze their experimental data. They typically have little software development experience, but there is seldom someone more knowledgeable available to support them. Making matters worse, they often are not at all interested in software development and thus also don't invest the time to learn more than the absolute minimum necessary to solve their current problem, even if it could save them a lot of time in the long run. (Even though I find the situation frustration, I can't say I don't relate, given that I feel the same way about LaTeX.)
Honestly, they should be using conda (if they're working on their laptops) and the cluster package manager otherwise.
Conda has slowly but surely gone down the drain as well. It used to be bullet proof but there too you now get absolutely unsolvable circular dependencies.
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They're not applications developers, but they need to write code. That's the whole point. Python is popular within academia because it replaces R/Excel/VB.Net, not Java/C++.
Or they can give them a self contained binary that dodges 80% of these support issues because hear me out - and we've known this for 60+ years:
Users do NOT read the manual. Users ignore warnings. Users double click "AnnaKurnikovaNude.exe".