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by f6v
1943 days ago
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> The main reason why research code becomes a tangled mess is due to the intrinsic nature of research. It is highly iterative work where assumptions keep being broken and reformed depending on what you are testing and working on at any given time. Oh, boy, how many times have I heard this working at a startup. There is some truth to it, it's hard to organise code in the first weeks of a new project. But if you work on something for 3+ months, it becomes a matter of making a conscious effort to clean things up. > To make a concrete example, imagine writing an application where requirements changed unpredictably every day, Welcome to working with product managers at any early stage-company. Somehow I managed to apply TDD and good practices most of the time. Moreover, I went back to school after 7+ years developing software full-time. I guarantee that most of the low-quality research code is a result of a lack of discipline and experience in writing maintainable software. |
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Bingo! Most research code is written by graduate students who never had a job before, so they do not know how to write maintainable software. You are definitely the exception, as you held a software dev job before going back to school.