Comment by cryoshon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryoshon | Hacker News Reader

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This is accurate. I am a good example of this phenomenon. Scientists don't know how to code in a way that is intelligible to someone else, and in academic shops, there's probably only going to be one person who writes/understands a program in the first place. This one person probably views coding purely as an icky means to an end, and his adviser thinks it's a waste of time if it even reaches his knowledge whatsoever. As soon as this person moves on, the software he was working on will be rendered nonfunctional.

Part of it is complete ignorance of standards and best practices; another part is a complete lack of documentation (too much time spent on non-science activity to justify making it). It's a problem because scientists can always make use of information technology, but they don't quite have the focus to prioritize it. Honestly, passing it off to non-science devs hasn't worked well in my experience, there's a knowledge gap that's really hard to get over.

I think the core of the problem is that coding and documentation are not considered part of the "science". Contrast it with writing papers, which is understood as communication with scientific peers, the community, and therefore is "science" -- and, of course, is one of the measures of scientific progress. Writing code is not. Anecdotally, writing papers about code is (on occasion), so maybe there is a way to convince the scientific community that the code is important too?

Some Scientists are used to describing something by stripping away all the irrelevant matrix and concisely stating the idea at issue. Maybe they write code that way - as little boilerplate as possible, just a few concise lines that capture the algorithm.

Or maybe they write hash, I don't know. But their approach isn't 'let me craft some good code', its 'let me describe my thesis' which will end up in a different place than any trained software professional.

I think a more fundamental problem is that coding and documentation aren't actually taught in a formalized way to many scientists, so you pick up the habits that worked for you at the time, and just carry those forward.

True, for the most part practicing scientists have not had a good exposure to proper software practices.

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