[Biopython] Why so few recipes in the cookbook?

Brad Chapman chapmanb at 50mail.com
Mon Dec 21 13:11:48 UTC 2009


Peter and Daniel;
Really interesting discussion. Documentation is an area that can
always use more work to appeal to a wider audience.

Daniel:
> > While this tutorial is enough to CS-oriented guys, it's a really big
> > step to grasp such information for people from other communities.
> > That's why I'm always a little confused about the idea behind bio
> > projects. If the idea is programming of scientists, the approach is
> > way too CS.

This stresses why we actively encourage contributions from biologists
as well. Many of the contributors to Biopython tend more towards the
programming/bioinformatics side, since that experience helps in building
up and appreciating a re-usable toolkit. When those same people write
documentation, it is going to be naturally biased towards the sort of
work they do.

I'd definitely encourage you, and anyone else who might be
interested, to build up examples that are more intuitive to those
coming at the work from a different starting point. This is exactly
the idea behind starting up the cookbook on the wiki; it's all
freely editable, so dig right in.

Brad



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