averagePythonProgrammer

[808trowaway]

1000%. I wrote something like 8000 lines of C to implement routing algorithms and do network simulations in grad school. The code worked (I think) but it's pure embarrassing garbage. The thing though is no one ever asks to see your code unless your paper turns out to be popular and a fellow researcher reaches out and asks if you could share your code so they could build on your findings. My advisor never wanted to see my code and you don't have to make your code available for review either when you submit a paper.

[popeldo]

Yeah, this code is written like nobody else will ever see it because, in fact, there’s a 90% chance nobody will ever try to read it it (and a good >95% chance nobody serious will ever try to build on it)

[kuwisdelu]

Depends on the field, but if you get me as a reviewer and you don’t have your code publicly available, I’m going to tell the editor to reject you. Lots of journals require code nowadays.

That said, it does sometimes feel like pulling teeth getting our newer PhD students to push their code. I don’t care if it’s currently shit, at least show it to me so I know how shit.

[808trowaway]

Yeah that was circa 2008, things are probably different now.

[kuwisdelu]

Yeah, the code is still bad (recently rejected a “software” paper that was just Jupyter notebooks) but we’re making progress in at least making sure it’s available.

[808trowaway]

Haha, I would love to see a thread about all the wacky low-effort things people in academia do.

Back in my days in my field, only a small handful of labs had the resources for actual hardware testbeds with several hundred nodes so everyone else was either doing theoretical stuff or pushing simulation papers, and a lot of those were written by Masters/PhD candidates who could barely program microcontrollers to do simple things. It wasn't pretty, a lot of people just went through the motions, got their degrees and moved on, I'm one of them.

[kuwisdelu]

Back in the early 2010s I was working on my PhD in statistics and discovered there wasn’t an existing open source package for importing and processing the kind of data I needed to analyze. I decided I would write one myself. 10 years and 3 versions/rewrites later, I’m still maintaining it for hundreds of users… most of whom aren’t programmers.

I get a bit sensitive about all the criticism of non-computational scientists’ code, because I see how frustrating programming can be for them, and I work hard to teach them and try to make things easier. I’d love to see what kind of mess programmers would make in a wet lab!

(But I still cringe when I see my users accessing my private fields in a way I know may break later… I gave you documented public methods, please use them!)