Hacker News Reader

Comment by smartmic | Hacker News Reader

There are so many alternatives, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20410848

Any information about which language is leading the field?

Which field? In the absence of any constraint, the choice of workflow management system is down to individual preferences. Note that the goal of CWL is to be a standard workflow language not a workflow management system. That is, it is concerned purely by how to precisely describe a workflow, not by how it should be implemented which is the task of a workflow management system. The diversity of workflow management systems starts to be recognized as an obstacle to re-use and reproducibility of scientific workflows. Having different systems implementing a standard language would help get around this issue. Several workflow management systems used in bioinformatics have or are implementing support for CWL.

Right now I'd say it's in competition with Workflow Description Language (WDL), Nextflow, and maybe Snakemake.

CWL seems to be more popular than WDL, as far as I can tell, but Nextflow is probably more popular than both.

Skimming the WDL “Quick Start Guide” (https://software.broadinstitute.org/wdl/documentation/quicks...) to get an overview, it’s like watching a snake eat its tail. You’d think a narrative in this problem space would at least have a clear beginning, middle, and end.

At least the Nextwave homepage (https://www.nextflow.io/) starts with a clean concrete written example, even if it does leave you to deduce its actual meaning for yourself.

https://xkcd.com/927/

This is not exactly true in this case as before CWL there was no standard, only languages tied to particular implementations.

Came to the comments looking for this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com