Codifying Bioinformatics Processes Without Programming

Bioinformatics is bimodal, with results gathered either from rigid pipelines, their functions encoded in programs accessible only to specialists, or from ad hoc collections of scripts or web pages, used once, then lost track of or thrown away. We discuss the possibility of developing tools to straddle this divide, in particular, tools using graphical dataflow programming, which have the potential to make bioinformatics flexible, approachable and repeatable.