[jghn]

> make things possible, often just to run it once

This is the largest difference. When there's no expectation of code lasting beyond a very short lifespan, why go through the effort to future proof things, improve maintainability, have better ergonomics, etc?

[bogwog]

Because science doesn't work unless experimental results are reproducible.

[jghn]

Sure. And once you land on something worth keeping, you clean it up then. But between time point 0 and then, a whole lot of code gets written to be run very few times.