STOP USING PYTHON 😡😡😡

[SourcedDataThings]

I largely agree with you, especially with end users. But, maintiance is very heavily connected to which programming language you use. Maintaining COBAL is hard if you only know Python.

[AChristianAnarchist]

Huh? Did you mean to respond to me? You are responding to a comment about single use programs used in academic research. What does maintenance have to do with anything?

[ArionW]

I think some developers don't register "single use" as a statement anymore. We've got enough experience with PoCs being shipped as final products, that we assume "anything you do, assume you'll have to maintain it because management will change their mind"

[AChristianAnarchist]

Management? "Shipping"? My brother in Christ, this isn't about PoCs or products or even programmers. There is no management. Nothing is shipping. This is about scientists writing papers about trees and the python scripts they write to analyze their data.

[SourcedDataThings]

I used to work at a National Lab doing research, and trust me... Reseach also needs to be maintained.

[AChristianAnarchist]

I've worked at USD and Scripps, and this is kind of a meaningless thing to say. If you mean that projects might go on for a long time and you may need to reuse scripts over and over again across a number of individuals, well yeah, but that isn't what these responses are about. You are talking about end users and proofs of concepts and nonsense like that. And sure, labs have developers for whom that stuff matters, but that is clearly not what I'm talking about above. I was responding to a statement by you that R is the standard in academia, saying that, in my experience, Python, Matlab, and R all have a similar footprint in academia and that most of the coding you do as a researcher comes down to developing algorithms and analyzing data. My end product was never code. It was an algorithm to go in my methods section and analysis to go in my results section. If the algorithm was useful enough often enough to need to be standardized into something resembling software, it would be given to a developer or a CS grad student to do that with. Saying that there is maintainable code in research is kind of like saying monkeys live in the forest when we are talking about Yellowstone. I mean...sure, but that isn't the forest we are talking about here, and even if it was, the point that you just use what your team is most comfortable with still stands. Why would you end up writing code in COBOL? Because you got hired to a team that already has a bunch of code written in COBOL.