[debacle]

From my experience in knowing a few scientists, the pattern seems to be:

- Scientists try their best to be good programmers, but are scientists first.

- Someone the scientist knows, or someone on the team with more programming knowledge, turns what the scientist produced into something maintainable at some point.

- If they're lucky, the grant will have resources for a script/software maintainer.

Scientists are scientists. I know a few who can do things with awk that probably should never be done, but they use the tools they know to get the data to look the way they need.