Re:Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse
by lmm on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @08:11PM
(#34333716)
> So why doesn't that happen? Is testing improvements too expensive? Do scientific programmers just have no respect for the craft whatsoever? Is there nobody with the necessary interdisciplinary skill set?
Academia relies on paying grad students peanuts and dangling the carrot of being able to get citations under their name to make up for it. There's no way to publish a paper by cleaning up code, much less get cited for doing so.
Bear in mind there's basically zero "general" funding available. Everything has to be paid out of a specific grant and they want to see it being used for that specific purpose, which likely ends with publishing a paper.
But the short version is yes, academia has no respect for the craft. Papers are what matters, so code will always be the minimum necessary to publish a paper, which is generally: copy someone else's fortran/numpy code, tweak it enough until it runs (once, on your laptop) and gives the result you were looking for, publish.
Academia relies on paying grad students peanuts and dangling the carrot of being able to get citations under their name to make up for it. There's no way to publish a paper by cleaning up code, much less get cited for doing so.
Bear in mind there's basically zero "general" funding available. Everything has to be paid out of a specific grant and they want to see it being used for that specific purpose, which likely ends with publishing a paper.
But the short version is yes, academia has no respect for the craft. Papers are what matters, so code will always be the minimum necessary to publish a paper, which is generally: copy someone else's fortran/numpy code, tweak it enough until it runs (once, on your laptop) and gives the result you were looking for, publish.