Re:Why can't you guys comment your fucking code?
by throwawayjava on Monday July 03, 2017 @11:41PM
(#14693381)
Believe me, very few grad students are writing code to "look smart".
First of all, coding isn't exactly a high class activity in most of academia. Any implementation that's not an uncommented mathematica notebook or matlab mess is in the top 1% of academic code.
Second of all, no one reads the code. So while there are incentives to intelli-obfuscate papers to trick naive reviewers, those incentives don't exist with code. (Oh, and it doesn't really work out well in papers either most of the time.)
First of all, coding isn't exactly a high class activity in most of academia. Any implementation that's not an uncommented mathematica notebook or matlab mess is in the top 1% of academic code.
Second of all, no one reads the code. So while there are incentives to intelli-obfuscate papers to trick naive reviewers, those incentives don't exist with code. (Oh, and it doesn't really work out well in papers either most of the time.)