Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code still run?

Re:Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code stil... by arethuza on Monday August 24, 2020 @12:01PM (#24261913)

I would regard (from experience) "science ready" code as something that you run just often enough to get the results to create publications.

Any effort to get code working for other people, or documented in any way would probably be seen as wasted effort that could be used to write more papers or create more results to create new papers.

This kind of reasoning was one of the many reasons I left academic research - I personally didn't value publications as deliverables.

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Re:Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code stil... by chriswarbo on Monday August 24, 2020 @12:52PM (#24262540)

My experience has been similar.

Still, there's plenty of room to encourage good(/better) practices which cost essentially nothing, e.g. using $PWD rather than /home/bob/foo

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Re:Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code stil... by gowld on Monday August 24, 2020 @12:15PM (#24262089)

If your experiment is not repeatable, it's an anecdote not data.

Any effort to write a paper readable for other people, or document the experiment in any way would probably be seen as wasted effort that could be used to create more results.

The "don't show your work" argument only makes sense if you are doing PR, not science.

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Re:Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code stil... by neutronicus on Monday August 24, 2020 @12:23PM (#24262177)

If it's repeatable by you then it's a trade secret, not an anecdote

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Re:Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code stil... by arethuza on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @04:39AM (#24269302)

I specifically got told off by my supervisor for trying to "improve" some of the software we were working on!

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