[geebee]

I've worked with a lot of research code. I agree with you that tangled code is somewhat intrinsic to the kind of code written for research.

Here's the thing. Sometimes, there's no code - I mean, they'll find something, but nobody can say, with certainty, that it is the code that generated the data or results you're trying to recreate. There's often no data - and by that, I mean, nothing, not even a dummy file so you can tell if it even runs or understand what structure the data needs to be in. No build, no archive history, no tests. And when I say no tests, I'm not talking about red/green bar integration and unit tests, I mean, ok, the code ran... was this what it was supposed to produce?

Many of these projects are far, far more messed up than the intrinsic nature of research would explain - though I will again agree that research code may be unusually likely to descend into entropy.