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A comment on What's the point of writing good scientific software?. Parent comment

Re:What's the point of writing good scientific software? by michaelbarton on Friday February 08, 2013 @03:28PM (#5189924)
I am the author of this post. I don't disagree with anything you wrote. Several posts on my blog say exactly this. The software I wrote however is open source on github [1], has it's own website [2], has man pages for each command [3], example projects [4] and three screencasts guiding how to install and use it [5].

I did this because I wished that all bioinformatics software had this attention to usability and documentation. However now I wonder what was the point of all of this if no one ever ends up using it? I could have done the minimum for publication then spent this time working on finishing other manuscripts I have waiting.

As I wrote though, I agree with what you wrote in your comment. I just don't think there is any incentive for post-docs in academia to prioritise writing good software over pushing out additional papers.

[1]: https://github.com/michaelbarton/genomer

[2]: http://next.gs

[3]: https://github.com/michaelbarton/genomer-plugin-view/tree/ma...

[4]: https://github.com/michaelbarton/chromosome-pfluorescens-r12...

[5]: http://www.youtube.com/user/BioinformaticsZen

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Re:What's the point of writing good scientific software? by JohnBooty on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @10:19AM (#5213440)
Instead of, "But the author seems to have considered (and discarded) them"

I ought to have written, "But the author has considered them and concluded that their benefits don't outweigh their costs in his case."

I totally support what you're saying! IMHO it's definitely not worth it to document/open-source/etc code at the cost of one's career or happiness, especially when the code is of questionable utility to others.

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