[physicsguy]

> Meanwhile a professional programmer has to become good at things that mathematicians and scientists don’t have to care about, like version control or the idiosyncrasies of a specific language.

Really depends on what kind of mathematician or scientist you are to be honest though. How good is someone's data analysis of an experiment if they can't reproduce it? Or if they've got 6 different versions of an application with 100k lines of code in a single file, each labelled "code_working(1).f90", "code_not_working.f90", etc... These are real problems with what people actually do in science; software development skills are poor and people do things badly.

There're organisations like Software Carpentry globally and the Software Sustainability Institute in the UK which exist to try and promote some thought about developing software as researchers, and making the software sustainable in the long term rather than letting it die every time a PhD student leaves.

[throwawaymath]

That's essentially my point. Programming and mathematics are so different from each other that, without special effort, a professional in one domain shouldn't be expected to be meaningfully better than average in the other.

This applies in both directions most mathematicians and scientists have such poor version control and development hygiene because mathematics doesn't imbue them with any special insight about how to be an engineer.