From Reproducibility to Over-Reproducibility (2016)
&gt;&gt; Oh, and I think there are some people who use version control for the text
of their papers (almost certainly a proper subset of those who are for some
reason writing their papers in Markdown or LaTeX). Unless your paper has a lot
of math in it, I have no idea why anyone would subject themselves to this form
of torture. Let me be the one to tell you that you are no less smart or tough
if you use Google Docs. In fact, some might say you’re more smart, because you
don’t let command-line ethos&#x2F;ideology get in the way of actually getting
things done… :)<p>I really don&#x27;t understand where this is coming from. It sounds like the
reaction of someone forced to do something difficult and time-intensive for no
good reason other than because someone thinks it&#x27;s &quot;the right way&quot;, which I
can get behind. But, from what I can tell, it&#x27;s just doing a &quot;git add&quot; and
&quot;git commit&quot; every once in a while. Does that really require &quot;command-line
ethos&quot;?<p>This maybe because I don&#x27;t really understand how using git to track changes to
your code or text helps <i>reproducibility</i>. Once you have your experiment and
plotting scripts where you want them, reproducibility should be a matter of
making those scripts available to others. Before you are at that point, using
git is useful because you can un-screw mistakes caused by big changes or
changes two or three versions of your code ago. It doesn&#x27;t help reproduce your
work, just organise it so you don&#x27;t end up making a big, steaming mess of it.
So maybe I don&#x27;t understand what the author means by &quot;reproducibility&quot;?<p>Finally, all the same points the author makes against using version control
apply to software development also, or anyway I don&#x27;t see why they shouldn&#x27;t
aply to software development also. Yet, an entire industry seems to agree that
version control saves butts much more than it wastes time and one would
probably be very hard pressed to convince software developers that they don&#x27;t
need to use version control. So either there&#x27;s something that entire industry
is getting awfully wrong, or software developers like to &quot;torture&quot; themselves,
or the author is missing something, maybe?