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Comment by Qem | Hacker News Reader

The root cause is academia still didn't adjust the rewards to take into account the computer age. People only get career points by publishing papers, not source code. Software is a fundamental aspect of most current research. We need to recognize researchers that dedicate to write/maintain the required software, awarding the fair amount of career points. Make good software documentation be the equivalent to papers for them, career-wise. It surely would improve the state of academic software. Today students still commonly have to struggle with software stuck in the 70s, usability-wise.

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It would also greatly increase the diffusion into industry of techniques. I often read papers that describe an interesting approach to something I am interested in doing. But often the paper requires me to read many references and spend dozens of hours or more to reach an implementation myself. I simply can't invest that time on something that might work.

But if the code were available... then you could quickly test out if something is worth pursuing.

Arguably, by the time they implemented, they tested, at that point you're just consuming.

So another way of handling this to contribute advancement at scale is "exercise left to the reader", and then we readers should publish too.

R&D in big tech should contribute as academia does.

We have our "Chief Scientists" and "Principal Engineers" titles that recognize, essentially, a tenure track, that should be on the merits of publishing code implementing new techniques.

You can publish a paper about a tool, and publish another paper each time you come out with a major version change about said tool:

https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/edgeR.ht...

This is a good idea. Imagine when future Nobel prizes are given to physicists who write and maintain software just as much to those who publish papers.

This problem doesn't need any nobels to be solved. Just calibrate the rewards so programmer-scientists don't risk career stagnation if they take the time to develop and maintain tools of critical importance for science.

But imagine if physicists were as recognized for software development as much as for experimental work or theorizing. That's a much more important reward.

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