[short_sells_poo]

You are correct, lifetimes are being tracked in some form at all times. So let me rephrase: lifetimes are irrelevant to the primary work of a quant during research. The objective is to establish whether an idea works. In 99% of the cases, it doesn't and the code and the project are a dead end. Under these circumstances you need to reduce the amount of cognitive overhead that goes into program structure to a minimum.

Research is fundamentally different from the usual programming exercise. Research is like prospecting. You want to try as many different locations as possible. You don't want to build nuclear shelter grade construction at every potential site because 99 out of a 100 is a dud. You'd never find anything.

You want a tool that allows you to get quick results to confirm if a site has potential and then you want to be able to scale your tools for proper mining.