Re:Why can't you guys comment your fucking code?
by throwawayjava on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @07:31AM
(#14695186)
> You might be conflating software graduate students with research developers
I'm not conflating. The vast majority of research software is written by grad students.
> why do so many professional research developers also suck as writing comprehensible code?
Because incentives aren't aligned. And it's not even clear they should be aligned.
> There absolutely exist research developers who write very high quality software... In reality - a lot of research developers are simply incompetent
There absolutely exist software developers who write very high quality software... In reality - a lot of software developers are simply incompetent.
> If people were able to investigate the underlying source code, that would be fairly apparent... Own it
1. A huge amount of research software is open-sourced and does work as advertised.
2. You don't get it both ways. Either no open source demands, or no expectation that grad students should "own their work" -- and then making demands that they literally don't own their work.
I'm not conflating. The vast majority of research software is written by grad students.
> why do so many professional research developers also suck as writing comprehensible code?
Because incentives aren't aligned. And it's not even clear they should be aligned.
> There absolutely exist research developers who write very high quality software... In reality - a lot of research developers are simply incompetent
There absolutely exist software developers who write very high quality software... In reality - a lot of software developers are simply incompetent.
> If people were able to investigate the underlying source code, that would be fairly apparent... Own it
1. A huge amount of research software is open-sourced and does work as advertised.
2. You don't get it both ways. Either no open source demands, or no expectation that grad students should "own their work" -- and then making demands that they literally don't own their work.