Comment by jcoffland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcoffland | Hacker News Reader

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This article is anecdotal and ranty but I will respond anyway. I've spent the last 15 years working on various projects involving cleaning up scientific code bases. Messy unengineered code is fine if only a very few people ever use it. However, if the code base is meant to evolve over time you need good software engineering or it will become fragile and unmaintainable.

That said, there are many "programmers" who apply design concepts willy nilly with out really understanding why. They often make a bigger mess of things. There is an art to quality software engineering which takes time to learn and is a skill which must be continually improved.

The claim in the article that programmers have too much free time on their hands because they aren't doing real work, like a scientist does, is obviously ridiculous. Any programmer worth their salt is busy as hell and spends a lot of thought on optimizing their time.

Conclusion, scientists should work with software engineers for projects that are meant to grow into something larger but hire programmers with a proven track record of creating maintainable software.

I've had similar experience with scientific software. When I'm told that the existing software is "OK because it works", I ask "how do you know it works?" because typically there are no unit tests or tests of any sort of individual stages for that matter.

I've found that scientists tend to assume "it works" when they like the results they see such as R^2 values high enough to publish.

Recently I converted some scientific software that was using correlation^2 (calling it R^2) as a measure for model predictions, as opposed to something more appropriate like PRESS-derived R^2s (correlation is totally inappropriate for judging predictions because it's translation and scale independent on both observed and predicted sides). Nobody went looking for the problem because results seem good and reasonable. Converting to a proper prediction R^2, some of the results are now negative, meaning the models are doing worse than a simple constant-mean function. Yikes.

Yes, I work on a mixed team of physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, and the most frustrating part is trying to work with some of the physicists' code. For the most part it is fairly functional, but the problem is that it is almost unreadable. It is quite clear that they write it as fast as possible so they can do what the OP would call real work without regard for others will need to work with and maintain that code later on.

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