"In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it. But how can you read a lot of it if you don't know what it means?
In this article, instead of focusing on one or two concepts, I'll try to go through as many Rust snippets as I can, and explain what the keywords and symbols they contain mean."
Synthetic biology is among the most hyped research topics this century, and in 2010 it entered its teenage years. But rather than these being a problematic time, we’ve seen synthetic biology blossom and deliver many new technologies and landmark achievements.
In 2020 synthetic biology turned 20 years old. It’s first decade saw some impressive research papers, lots of visionary thinking and unprecedented excitement, but its second decade—from 2010 to 2020—was when the hype really needed to be replaced by some real achievements. So how has it done?
The article this links to is interesting enough, but what's really interesting is some of the discussion about how people do, or think people should, approach keeping electronic lab notebooks.
I feel you can tell which are the comments from software developers who don't really appreciate the requirements; they are, understandably, the ones who focus on change histories and the like, without picking up on the fact that generally you don't ever want people going back and changing anything.
As someone who works with people who need to deal with this, it's an interesting read and follows a lot of my journey from ignorance on the subject to some appreciation of the issues.
Or, put another way, which languages are killing the planet because they use more power on a system? Possibly. Perhaps.
Spoiler: FORTRAN is better than Python.
