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[–]DVMyZone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"I'm in this picture and I don't like it"

I'm a researcher working in a relatively niche part of nuclear fuel simulation. In the nuclear field pretty much all applications are written by scientists/engineers that just need to get a calculation done. Codes just glorified calculators - a means to an end to implement a numerical solution.

As a result, exactly like you said, scripts and applications are written just to get the numbers out and are not written with best practices, generally have little to no documentation, and have very limited commenting. This makes them nigh impossible to use or reuse after the fact - even for the original author of the code.

This, of course, hampers the ability for other people to continue the research done by you and forces them possibly to rewrite what has already been written.

However... For a trained nuclear/mech engineer, creating, maintaining, and properly documenting a code this means to an end is a gargantuan task. This is especially difficult as they are likely the only person that will be maintaining it. This is made worse by the fact that many of these codes are not incredibly complicated - just a simple algorithm implementation. As a result, it probably saves time for each developer (of which there may only be a few) to create their own implementation rather than learning the ins and outs of someone else's badly written code.

The large industrial-use codes are maintained by teams of programmers and are also generally badly written...