[shpongled]

Absolutely. My point was more than you can't expect comp. biologists to actually be "good" programmers when compared to SWE or even web devs.

Most of the code I write to do biological data analysis is fairly linear. However, I also generally use a static type system and modularity to help ensure correctness.

I've perused a lot of code written by scientists, and they could certainly learn to use functions, descriptively name variables, use type systems and just aspire to write better code. I just saw a paper published in Science had to issue a revision because they found a bug in their analysis code after publication that changed most of their downstream analysis.