[marmalade2413]

I was going to write a response but you've put what I would have said perfectly. The problem, at least in academia, is the pressure to publish. There is very little incentive to write maintainable code and finalise a project to be something accessible to an end user. The goal is to come up with something new, publish and move on or develop the idea further. This alone is not enough reason not to partake in practices such as unit tests, containerisation and versatile code but most academic code is written by temporary "employees". PhD's a in a department for 3-4 years, Post Doc's are there about the same amount of time.

For someone to shake these bad practices, they need to fight an uphill battle and ultimately sacrifice their research time so that others will have an easier time understanding and using their codes. Another battle that people trying to write "good" code would need to fight is that a lot of academics aren't interested in programming and see coding as simply as means to an end to solve a specific problem.

Also, another bad practice few bad practices to add to the list:

* Not writing documentation.

* Copying, cutting, pasting and commenting out lines of code in lieu of version control.

* Not understanding the programming language their using and spending time solving problems that the language has a built in solution for.

This is at least based on my own experience as a PhD student in numerical methods working with Engineers, Physicists, Biologists and Mathematicians.

[jwagenet]

Sometimes I don’t blame people for committing the ‘sin’ of leaving commented code; unless you know that code used to exist in a previous version, it may well have never existed.

[leksak]

It can be very warranted. For a client I'm working with now I'll routinely comment out big swaths of code as they change their mind back and forth every month or so on certain things. They won't even remember it used to exist.