[snowwrestler]

> Scientists can't reach a meaningful conclusion without proper use of tools.

I'm just trying to make the point that "proper" is subjective. Software developers evaluate the quality of code according to how well it adheres to well-established coding practices, but those practices were established to address long-term issues like maintainability and security, not whether the software produces the right answer.

You can get the right answer out of software even if the code is ugly and hacky, and for a lot of scientific research, the answer is all that matters.

[kd0amg]

The usual reason programmers object to ugly, hacky code is that it's a lot harder to be justifiably confident that such code actually does produce the right answer -- "garbage in, garbage out" is just as true in function position as it is in argument position.