This is precisely the difference from regular programming: Our code is typically going to be used by a very small number of people, and the inputs are typically very well constrained. It's typically faster to just call up the new prospective user and explain the code than to triple your development time making it rock solid.

For instance, I'm currently working on a project where I have to process 110 GB/s of radio data aggregated from 288 antennas. The data will need intensive cleaning after, so plenty of thought is put into logging the right statistics (since we have to average for 3 months to get the right data). This is where the real effort is being applied.

However, if there happens to be a missing edge case or malformed data packet, I can (and will) just cronjob a (if process hung, pkill and restart) the processor with the next bit of realtime data. Anyone who wants to reuse the algorithm will need our exact same antennas and specialized computing hardware, so why make it portable?