[prepend]

I would not expect the best software engineers to be at nist or nasa as evidenced by their lack of amazing open source projects.

Maybe there are some super great private projects but I expect those amazing capabilities would still be evident in the stuff that is put out.

Note, there’s some good stuff out of NIST and NASA (check out open.nasa.gov) but I don’t see things being handed off to Apache and stuff.

[tayo42]

Using open source to judge quality seems wild. Maybe people just have no interest in maintaining an open source project. Looking from the outside at some of the stuff people put up with, it doesn't look worth it at all. I'll just work privately

[prepend]

This is a good point, but it’s all I can see. It’s not like there are famous NASA and NIST closed source software projects.

It’s hard to judge “great programmers” so I think the best is to proxy using whatever factors you have access to.

I guess it could also be books written and presentations given. Or contributions to other projects using nasa and nist addresses.

Point being, I don’t think there’s any evidence to think that nasa and nist have great progs.

[0xffff2]

As the sole maintainer of a popular open source NASA project (and contributor to several others), I can say that my open source work reflects very poorly on my work overall. We have a real problem in that there is a drive to open source things, but there is no money at all to support open sourced work. As soon as the open sourced work is no longer something I use day to day, I have to either maintain it on my personal time or it gets abandoned.

[ak217]

NIST and other government institutes are not known for open source work mainly because most of their work is a combination of science and technology communication. They deal in publications, conferences, and reference datasets. In my industry, NIST and the NIH produce the most important R&D reference datasets in the world, and everyone else looks to them for guidance. With that said, the NIH also occasionally produces world class software too (NCBI BLAST, etc.) although they do have some issues with parts of their software engineering culture being a bit out of date.