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

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.