[Python-ideas] Add citation() to site.py

[Andrew Barnert]

On Mar 17, 2016, at 16:08, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 2:38 PM, Steve Dower <steve.dower at python.org> wrote:
>>> On 17Mar2016 1335, Ethan Furman wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On 03/17/2016 01:32 PM, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> One way to think about it is that providing a preferred citation is
>>>> useful for folks who want to cite, and folks who don't want to cite
>>>> will ignore it.
>>> 
>>> I would also think that citing the software increases the ease of
>>> duplicating the results.
>> 
>> 
>> Afraid not. Posting a requirements.txt or a conda spec file would be far
>> more valuable for this, or these days sharing a Jupyter Notebook with the
>> code and dependency-spec embedded.
> 
> Docker containers are also getting intense interest for this use case.

It's going to be so much fun trying to look back at early 21st century science from the future. "Up to about 2015, they were still publishing 'papers' written in the relatively simple 'postscript' language that we easily reverse engineered an interpreter for. Over the next few decades, they started publishing in more complicated formats, like entire virtual machines that were run by some software we no longer have access to that's only portable to operating systems that we have the source code for but don't know how to build. Successfully extracting some memory proteins from a not-entirely-decomposed body in what used to be Australia caused a bit of excitement last megasecond, but so far all we've been able to learn is how to construct a hat out of red felt. So for this segment of the class, we'll be looking almost entirely at whatever pop-science articles were recoverable from a backup of the Internet archive."