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I once spent a week porting some python2 researchware into python3. It was only at the end of that week that I discovered that it was the actual logic of the re
by opportune 9y ago
I once spent a week porting some python2 researchware into python3. It was only at the end of that week that I discovered that it was the actual logic of the researchware that was broken, and not the way I was porting it. I now distrust all FOSS except for widely used and tested ones. You would think that a graduate student would debug (or at least fix to the point of being interpretable) the work that they spent months on before publishing it as finished and adding it to pip.
And yes, 2to3 fixes 90% of porting problems. But in my experience, it was especially bad at handling, of all things, import statements. Definitely not a silver bullet.
- ofek 9y agoI'd be weary to conflate OSS with what you refer to as "researchware". Code coming from academia is notorious for poor reproducibility.
- opportune 9y agoI'm not conflating them, but clearly software can be both researchware and open source. I'm not going to start distrusting tensorflow or scikit-learn, but I'm going to be wary before I invest time in a promising niche software package, regardless of whether it was actually from academia or not.
- aaronchall 9y agoIt is tiresome, isn't it.
- sevensor 9y agoYou have a remarkably rosy view of grad students and their relationship to software. All it has to do is produce output (I hesitate to say work) one time, on one computer, under some conditions that may never be documented, let alone reproduced. This is doubly true if the code just a step in the analysis chain and not the actual subject of the research.
- opportune 9y agoIn this case, the software itself was the focus of the research. And this grad student still works at a very prestigious university for CS. I've worked in academia (as a research assistant) before so I'm familiar with shitty grad student software. But going to the effort to document and present on the software without making sure it even worked? That seemed excessively stupid to me.
- sevensor 9y agoThat's dismaying -- not at all surprising, unfortunately, but I understand your frustration. The upside-down incentives in the academic world are such that even somebody who ought to know better fails to produce useable software because there's no payoff. Actually, it's worse than that -- producing software other people can use means you might be giving a leg up to the competition, so there's an incetive to produce software that appears to work but is in fact useless.
- iak8god 9y ago> still works at a very prestigious university for CS > document and present on the software without making sure it even worked? That seemed excessively stupid to me It sounds like that individual is responding rationally to the incentive structure he's embedded in, and succeeding as a result.
- hprotagonist 9y agoYou would think that a graduate student would debug (or at least fix to the point of being interpretable) the work that they spent months on before publishing it as finished and adding it to pip. HA ha ha ha ha. No. Not even a little. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the big ones are: 1. Scientists aren't developers (some of us are exceptions, but we prove the rule). 2. The objective function of a grad student is "publish and graduate" not "write good code and use it forever".