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I would imagine (although I have no data to back this up), that the majority of contributors to open-source scientific programs are scientific researchers thems

by yaseer 11y ago

I would imagine (although I have no data to back this up), that the majority of contributors to open-source scientific programs are scientific researchers themselves. They are building tools to scratch their own itch. Hence it is win-win for them to build tools that contribute to their own research.

amelius 11y ago
Researchers are paid to churn out papers, working under publication pressure. As you can imagine, the result is not the best, most user-friendly software. (Making software is difficult. Adding publication pressure is not going to help the process.) So, there is a second class of people, called scientific programmers, who might do what you imagined. However, their work is undervalued. For example, although they are often listed as authors of scientific papers, they will almost never be first author. And this type of people will also be the first to disappear if funding dries up. Further, when writing scientific proposals, nobody thinks about hiring a scientific programmer, or it comes as an afterthought.
- yaseer 11y ago
  For the category of people you describe, I agree this has been the case in the past, and perhaps even the case at present. I think (or perhaps hope) the future may hold something different though. There are some industries such as bionformatics where the boundaries between science and scientific computing are being blurred. Whatsmore, I think this blurring of lines between science and computing will continue as a generally trend. Steven Wolfram (Mathematica's creator) articulated this, albeit poorly and hubristically in a "New Kind of Science". That work gained rightful criticism from the majority of the scientific community, but it did articulate a clear trend - scientific research and computation are becoming increasingly intertwined. We may not differentiate so sharply between the types of work you describe in future, and perhaps value scientific programming more.
- mauro3 11y ago
  There are efforts under way to improve the standing of scientific programmers, for instance the UK initiative described in this post: http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2015/06/what-is-a-research-software-engineer.html http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2015/06/what-is-a-researc... . There are now fellowships in the UK specifically aimed at scientific programmers: https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/calls/rsefellowships/ https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/calls/rsefellowships/ . Even so, currently there no real career path for scientific programmers. Hopefully this will change in the future!

by yaseer 11y ago

amelius 11y ago

Researchers are paid to churn out papers, working under publication pressure. As you can imagine, the result is not the best, most user-friendly software. (Making software is difficult. Adding publication pressure is not going to help the process.) So, there is a second class of people, called scientific programmers, who might do what you imagined. However, their work is undervalued. For example, although they are often listed as authors of scientific papers, they will almost never be first author. And this type of people will also be the first to disappear if funding dries up. Further, when writing scientific proposals, nobody thinks about hiring a scientific programmer, or it comes as an afterthought.

yaseer 11y ago
For the category of people you describe, I agree this has been the case in the past, and perhaps even the case at present. I think (or perhaps hope) the future may hold something different though. There are some industries such as bionformatics where the boundaries between science and scientific computing are being blurred. Whatsmore, I think this blurring of lines between science and computing will continue as a generally trend. Steven Wolfram (Mathematica's creator) articulated this, albeit poorly and hubristically in a "New Kind of Science". That work gained rightful criticism from the majority of the scientific community, but it did articulate a clear trend - scientific research and computation are becoming increasingly intertwined. We may not differentiate so sharply between the types of work you describe in future, and perhaps value scientific programming more.
mauro3 11y ago
There are efforts under way to improve the standing of scientific programmers, for instance the UK initiative described in this post: http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2015/06/what-is-a-research-software-engineer.html http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2015/06/what-is-a-researc... . There are now fellowships in the UK specifically aimed at scientific programmers: https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/calls/rsefellowships/ https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/calls/rsefellowships/ . Even so, currently there no real career path for scientific programmers. Hopefully this will change in the future!