[jltsiren]

> I don't believe "scientific code" is fundamentally different from any other code, I would go with following normal development practices

That depends on the field. In the part of bioinformatics I work (mostly combinatorial algorithms; floating point numbers are rare) normal software development practices often cease to be relevant the moment someone mentions design.

Writing research code is a part of doing research, and a key feature of research is that you often don't know what you are supposed to do. When I start writing code, I tend to expect that the code will solve the wrong problem in the wrong way. Once I have something that runs, I start experimenting with data to learn more about the problem domain. Eventually I have a better idea what the code is supposed to do (and maybe even how it should do that), and then it's time to rewrite and iterate. Design only becomes relevant in late stages of the project when I'm confident I know the problem I'm supposed to solve.

There are some similarities to prototyping, but it's prototyping over problems rather than over solutions to a particular problem.