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Comment by myself248 | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of actual professional programmers can't manage this, how is it a fair standard to hold scientists to, when the code is just one of the many tools they're trying to use to get their real job done?

I think moving away from the cesspool of imported remote libraries that update at random times and can vanish off the internet without warning, would help a lot of both cases.

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Professional programmers should adopt package manager that focus on reproducibility like Guix and Nix and make them accessible enough for non programmers to use.

Neither of these are perfect but in my experience they are worlds better than apk, Dockerfiles, and many other commonly used solutions.

http://guix.gnu.org/

https://nixos.org/

I've had the pleasure of setting up a guix system in production.

The next guy to come along didn't understand it and threw it all away.

That’s very unfortunate.

I think we have to hold scientists to higher standards for code quality because it has a direct impact on the findings of their results. How many off by one or other subtle errors that are found later in testing have most software engineers written in their career? Is it fine to just say eh, scientific results can be off by one because the standards should be lower?

>Plenty of actual professional programmers can't manage this, how is it a fair standard to hold scientists to

That's a good point. On a tangential note, prototype code tends to be at a higher level than production code, so there is a higher chance 10 year old code will continue to run on the scientist side, as long as the libraries imported haven't vanished.

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