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I think I misunderstood your position earlier. My experience with academic codes seems to differ significantly from yours. It is not uncommon at all for scienti

I think I misunderstood your position earlier. My experience with academic codes seems to differ significantly from yours. It is not uncommon at all for scientific software to have no documentation at all in my experience, and very little if anything in terms of tests. I agree with you that it does not make sense to have detailed documentation and tests for all parts of scientific software. One must prioritize. What I'm arguing against is the (often implicit) attitude that documentation, testing, and other good software engineering practices are not necessary in science at all. I see now that you agree, and it's more of a question of the amount of software engineering practices which are optimal. I appear to prefer more than you do, but you clearly see the value of these practices. Correct me if I'm wrong.

petschge 8y ago
You are not wrong at all. And the amount of test coverage and documentation on needs depends a lot on the field, the numerical methods, the indended users, the type of the code (simulation vs analysis vs plotting) and so on. The thing where I seem to have a totally different view from most of HN is that I think that we make valid tradeoffs, and that undocumented function and tests that only cover 40% of the code base is a perfectly fine state of affairs, instead of being caused by scientists that are too stupif for basic software engineering. What a lot of software people also do not get at all is that variables such as x, v and a might be perfectly descriptive variable names.