Programming is harder than proving. Well, programming poorly is easier than proving, but making something that you could release and won't look like gum and bai

Programming is harder than proving. Well, programming poorly is easier than proving, but making something that you could release and won't look like gum and bailing wire is harder than proving. You wind up with a gum and bailing wire implementation that lives in your home directory until your laptop dies, and then you realize that nothing of value was lost because it has been years since you touched that project, and you move on. Proofs are the ideal artifact for a researcher because they don't require maintenance and don't have users. Think hard, write it down, publish, and move on. Academia punishes researchers that create and maintain tools for other people to use (for an example, look at the Sage people) and rewards researchers that publish papers. As a researcher, this feels wrong and frustrating, but there's really nothing I can do about it from within the system, or they'll kick me out for not publishing enough papers.