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>It's not unique to research either: I ran into exactly the same sort of tradeoff working at an early stage startup. This is what you are missing. It is resear
by BookmarkSaver 11y ago
>It's not unique to research either: I ran into exactly the same sort of tradeoff working at an early stage startup.
This is what you are missing. It is research. What they are saying is that the vast majority of the code academics write is "throwaway". It will only ever be used for a brief time or in a very limited capacity and then never again. This isn't software development. There is not technical debt incurred, because they almost never actually have to go back and run the code or repurpose it. There's not point in putting in the effort "up-front" for a deadline because there is no "later" that they usually have to deal with.
This article is about the exceptions. And making sure to write cleanly factored, well documented, maintainable and flexible code every single time you need a program isn't worth it for the very rare instances when someone else actually needs to continue developing it.
- dragandj 11y agoYou are right, but... I, as an academician, have another perspective. Often the very reason why the code is throwaway is because it is so bad. That's also one of the reasons why it is so difficult to replicate research. If code was more reusable, maybe there would not be that much need for throwaway because, well, we could use the code from one research project in another. But, it is difficult to teach old dogs new tricks, I guess...