Yes, scientists programming skills (as averaged over population) suck. Factor 1: Programming not credited in itself or reviewed in publishing process. Factor 2:

Yes, scientists programming skills (as averaged over population) suck. Factor 1: Programming not credited in itself or reviewed in publishing process. Factor 2: Often little education in or focus on programming, relative to wall clock time spent doing it. But I don't think that is only fixed by more education and making scientists behave more like programmers. I think that to change things one also needs far better alternatives than the options available today, so that people are really encouraged to switch. Somehow, these must be written by people who know their CS and can write compilers, yet engage with the why scientific computing is a mess on the tool side too, not dismiss it as laziness. I started out as a programmer, I have contributed to Cython, past two years have been pure web development in a startup. So I know very well why MATLAB sucks. Yet, the best tool I have found myself for doing numerical computing is a cobbled mess of Fortran, pure C, C/assembly code generated by Python/Jinja templates, Python/NumPy/Theano... The scientific Python community and Julia community has been making great progress, but oh how far there is left to go.