Why pytask?¶

There are a lot of workflow management systems out there with existing communities that accumulated a lot of experience over time. So why bother creating another workflow management system?

pytask is created having a particular audience in mind. Many researchers are not computer scientists first. Instead, they acquired some programming skills throughout their careers. Thus, a workflow management system must be extremely user-friendly and provide a steep learning curve.

pytask tries to address this point in many ways.

  1. pytask is written in Python, one of the most popular and fastest growing languages in scientific computing.

  2. For those who know pytest, the primary testing framework in Python, pytask will look highly familiar, and you will feel productive quickly. If you do not know pytest, you will learn two tools simultaneously.

  3. pytask tries to improve your productivity by offering a couple of features like repeating tasks, debugging of tasks and selecting subsets of tasks.

  4. pytask integrates with other tools used in the scientific community, such as R and Julia, and offers solutions to bridge the gap between a workflow management system written in Python and scripts in another language. For example, pytask makes paths to dependencies and products available in the scripts.

  5. The plugin system lets power users tailor pytask to their needs by adding additional functionality. It makes pytask extraordinarily versatile and offers people from different backgrounds to collaborate on the same software.