Re:Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code stil...
by auntienomen on Monday August 24, 2020 @12:19PM
(#24262133)
Oh, he didn't say 'accurate science', nice gotcha!
This is exactly the sort of pedantic cluelessness that scientists are seeking to avoid by not publishing their code.
Re:Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code stil...
by RandoHolmes on Monday August 24, 2020 @01:58PM
(#24263388)
I don't consider accuracy in science to be pedantic, and I suspect most others don't either.
To paraphrase what the other developer said: "I don't want my work to be checked, I'm not here for accuracy, just the act of doing science".
When I was young, the ability to invalidate was the core aspect of science, but apparently that's changed over the years.
How exactly is this a bad thing?
> I'm an accelerator physicist and I wouldn't want my code to end up on acceleratorskeptics.com with people that don't understand the material making low effort critiques of minor technical points. I'm here to turn out science, not production ready code.
But it should be noted that what you didn't say is that you're here to turn out accurate science.
This is the software version of statistics. Imagine if someone took a random sampling of people at a Trump rally and then claimed that "98% of Americans are voting for Trump". And now imagine someone else points out that the sample is biased and therefore the conclusion is flawed, and the response was "Hey, I'm just here to do statistics".
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Do you see the problem now? The poster above you pointed out that the conclusions of the software can't be trusted, not that the coding style was ugly. Most developers would be more than willing to say "the code is ugly, but it's accurate". What we don't want is to hear "the conclusions can't be trusted and 100 people have spent 10+ years working from those unreliable conclusions".