Why not just make biologists learn programming?
We’re all for it! However, many biologists – especially those who need to use computers for analysis only occasionally – do not consider it worth the time to learn programming. Alternatively, the Scriptome can be viewed as a first step towards programming: it can help biologists learn about problem decomposition, high-throughput analysis, and debugging, while avoiding the additional barrier of learning syntax and other programming techniques (variables, arrays, hashes, regular expressions…); and it provides short, working examples for student programmers to read and tweak.
