In a recent interview on the PowerScripting Podcast, Jeffrey Snover said that software versioning isn’t a problem, it’s a dilemma. The difference is that problems can be solved, but dilemmas can only be managed. No versioning system can do everything that everyone would like.
The same phenomena exists in biostatistics. As I’d mentioned in Galen and clinical trials, biostatistics is filled with dilemmas. There are problems along the way that can be solved, but fundamentally biostatistics manages dilemmas.