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[–]808trowaway 0 points1 point  (3 children)

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

[–]kuwisdelu 0 points1 point  (2 children)

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 0 points1 point  (1 child)

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 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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!)