[klmr]

> In lots of areas, "good code" doesn't matter much, if at all.

This is the received wisdom in biological science but I’m convinced that it’s trivially wrong. I’ve seen a lot of research code, most of it bad. I have no idea how many bugs are in this code, and I know for a fact that the original authors also don’t know. And it would be truly exceptional if these pieces of code were bug-free (in fact, there’s enough software engineering know-how to categorically conclude that a very high percentage of such code has bugs). How many of these bugs affect the correctness of the results?

… since the code quality is so bad, this is impossible to quantify. So, yes, code quality does matter in science, since it affects the probability of publishing wrong results.

Incidentally, there are cases of retractions of high-impact papers due to errors in code. Of course this will also happen with better code quality; but if conventional software engineering wisdom is right then it will happen substantially less.