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by virgo_eye
1945 days ago
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Do you think that people doing research at large technical organizations structure their code in the same way as academics? No, although there's always a portion which is active and unstable, they create packages, define interfaces, abstract out pieces which can be reused reliably and depended on. Similarly for other types of researchers in fields where the code is considered an important product. Eg. if you are doing research in compiler design, you're likely to want to create a compiler which can be used by other people. So you make a stable thing with tests, automated builds and so on. And you delimit and instrument the experimental parts. The real reason is the incentives. Not just are there no incentives to produce good quality code, there are incentives which make people focus on other outputs. Publish or perish means that people put up with technical debt just to get to the next result for the next paper, then do it again and again. |
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I believe this is true and is fueled by a misconception of what software is in research. Software in research is often akin to experimentalist work in the past. It's tacked onto theoretical work projects as an afterthought and not treated as what it really is: forcing the theory to be tested in a computational environment.
If we start treating research software like experimentalism in the past, we might get a bit more rigor out of the development process as well as the respect it really deserves.