[leecarraher]

Yes, not pointing out the difference between coding some novel technique and a well defined software project, completely misses the reason the code is often not well organized. Suggesting that researchers are bad programmers is just a lazy excuse, somewhat damaging, and by no means the rule. I wrote a large complex framework for my research and the very nature of it causes me to add modules and techniques for parts I didn't know would work. And at times hard forks for when I wanted to try something new, which merging back would be impossible to do cleanly. At times you have a hunch and like a fever dream, change who knows what, but you just have to see something through. There is no waterfall method, kanban and agile makes no sense here and even unit tests are I'll defined.

[User23]

This sounds like my software development methodology when I was in my early teens. I was certainly able to get things done and explore all kinds of things (I was doing game dev of course), but the code was a mess and I didn't even have a mature understanding that it was. I just thought that was how programming was and you just had to be really smart to keep things straight in your head.