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I disagree so strongly with this that I had a visceral reaction while reading it. C++ is a tool, not an end product. If you're not qualified to use a tool corr

I disagree so strongly with this that I had a visceral reaction while reading it. C++ is a tool, not an end product. If you're not qualified to use a tool correctly it's not the manufacturer's fault, it's yours. Why do so many people believe that good software development is not part of their job? If you write code then you're a developer, no matter your job title. If you write shit software, saying you're a researcher is not an excuse.

lucideer 6y ago
This is such a ridiculous comment I don't know where to start. Are you actually proposing that being a fully experienced & knowledgeable software engineer should be a base requirement for all academic research (in any field)? If you, working as a software engineer, were told tomorrow by your manager that you needed to perform heart surgery, and that that now fell under your responsibilities in your current role, would your argument be the same? The private sector's typical response to the problems in the article would be to hire qualified software engineers to assist researchers. Funding dictates this is impossible, so they make do.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  No, your analogy is definitely the most ridiculous thing here.
- pbourke 6y ago
  > Funding dictates this is impossible, so they make do. Put another way: software quality is not valued in academia. Let’s say the code in question was in great shape. Would it have mattered at all in the trajectory of anyone’s career? No. This is probably the one academic code base in a million that has received any negative reputational hit due to its quality.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > software quality is not valued in academia. And in general, it shouldn't. Code written by scientists is almost always throwaway prototypes. So it absolutely doesn't matter how decoupled, or easy to extend it is. The only aspect of quality that matters here is the simplicity, in the sense "it obviously has no bugs" (and related practices like testing). This is something that could be taught, but I think it should be also addressed from the other end of the spectrum - more pressure put on verification and reproducibility of results.
    - mcv 6y ago
      It doesn't have to be decoupled or easy to extend, but it should be readable enough to ensure it does what it's supposed to, and well-tested enough to verify it does what it's supposed to.
      - kwhitefoot 6y ago
        I think Blaise Pascal's (or whoever really said it) remark is apposite here: If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
- silveraxe93 6y ago
  Where in my comment did you see me proposing that "being a fully experienced & knowledgeable software engineer should be a base requirement for all academic research (in any field)" Go back and re-read it please. I'm saying you need to be capable of using the tools for your job. If I was working as a software engineer, I'd not be asked to perform heart surgery. A more realistic example would be a software engineer being tasked to develop software in the medical industry, where I would expect them to understand the subject matter enough to ascertain their software is not crap.
  - lucideer 6y ago
    Sorry but there's a pretty big gap between understanding the domain for which your software is intended, and being qualified to work as a professional in that domain. The latter is what you're asking of academics.
    - silveraxe93 6y ago
      I guess we are in agreement then ;) If academics are writing predictive modelling software, I ask that they are qualified to do so.
      - lucideer 6y ago
        > Where in my comment did you see me proposing that "being a fully experienced & knowledgeable software engineer should be a base requirement for all academic research (in any field)" > I ask that they are qualified to do so. You need to make up your mind on this one. Are you asking this or aren't you?
        silveraxe93 6y ago
        Being -- capable of writing quality software -- should be a base requirement for -- Anyone developing software used for academic research -- in any field -- in which the conclusions are based upon the correctness of this software. Not all academic research depends on writing software.
- mcv 6y ago
  > "The private sector's typical response to the problems in the article would be to hire qualified software engineers to assist researchers. Funding dictates this is impossible, so they make do." But that is a bizarre conclusion. Is it really cheaper to let scientists focus on something they know nothing about, than to hire an expert to do it? Do you cut costs by letting scientists mop the floor, clean the toilet and guard the entrance?
  - lucideer 6y ago
    > Is it really cheaper to let scientists focus on something they know nothing about, than to hire an expert to do it? Do you cut costs by letting scientists mop the floor, clean the toilet and guard the entrance? Believe it or not, mean software engineer salaries are marginally higher than those of janitors and door security.
    - mcv 6y ago
      But easily worth it if it saves the scientist a lot of time and makes the implementation of their model more accurate and reliable.
- web007 6y ago
  If you write software for your research then yes. Just as I would expect you to have a solid basis in statistics, you need more than a 101-level competency in programming / software engineering if that's what you use to do your job. Same goes no matter what tools you're using, you need something beyond basic competence or advice from someone who does. Nothing that I do day-to-day is remotely like surgery or in any way healthcare related, so that's a stupid straw man. Asking the same question of the academic _studying healthcare_ would be more apropos, but equally stupid and nonsensical.
- thu2111 6y ago
  There's plenty of funding in academia. Come on. It's a huge segment of society, governments spend billions on it. They don't hire software engineers to write their models because they know they can get published without that and they'd rather hire more students into their department and publish more papers. For academia to claim they can't afford to produce programs that work is absurd and damning - why should anyone believe anything in a scientific paper if this attitude is so widespread? Some people here are arguing it's ridiculous to expect academics to produce work that's correct, even putting assumptions to one side. All it takes to fix this is multi-disciplinary teams. Of the type found in almost any industry but apparently, not academia. Why is this idea so strongly rejected by academia when it's just common sense everywhere else?
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Well, even if, the tool doesn't come with a warning. Real-life tools come with them. (The question is, what kind of warning would be useful on a programming language? C/C++ perhaps should come with a booklet about pointers, but other than that, I can't think of any but one: "WARNING: this is a tool for extreme clarification of thought; if you're confused about your subject matter, your project will produce wrong results. As you write code, take steps to verify your understanding of your problem domain.") More importantly, our industry is spending a lot of time and marketing money on convincing that everyone can code, that it's just a matter of picking up a JavaScript tutorial and pressing F12 in the browser, and you too are now a software developer. These two views are in direct opposition to each other.
rainforest 6y ago
Good software development is missing from most academic promotion tracks. "Research Software Engineers" are a recently new thing, which is an admission that academics are not very good at software engineering and supports the notion that they can't reasonably be expected to be experts in two disciplines. There is a large amount of software being written by non-software engineers (most of it is Excel) so I think it's probably constructive to say that the solution lies elsewhere other than expecting academics to become software engineers. If that sort of requirement is in place it would be hard to argue against software engineering being a chartered engineering discipline with liabilities and qualifications which would be very disruptive to a lot of the industry. It is worth remembering that academic code sharing is rare in and of itself. This reaction is likely to cause other academics to shy away from publishing their code. Perhaps giving them an opportunity to make their mistakes public so that more skilled engineers could help before the credibility of their results is used to justify drastic government policies would be better?
zozbot234 6y ago
Some tools are inherently safer than others. The whole difference between C++ and Rust is that it's a bit harder to shoot yourself in the foot while using Rust, the way you can with C++. It's not that you can't do it, but generally it involves purposely bypassing its safety mechanisms. You're still supposed to know what you're doing, but you know where you need to pay attention.
ookdatnog 6y ago
> If you're not qualified to use a tool correctly it's not the manufacturer's fault, it's yours. It certainly _can_ be the manufacturer's fault, if the manufacturer's salespeople lied to you about the learning required to master the tool. I think the point of the article is that collectively, as a community of experts, we have been misguiding non-experts into thinking that C++ is a good tool for their job. A non-expert cannot make an informed decision on which tool to use, they _have_ to rely on advice from experts to pick their first tool, so if they feel like we're recommending C++ (and I agree with the author that this is not a good tool for non-experts), then that's, in a sense, on us. (That being said I did not inspect the code, so I don't know if the author's implication is right that C++ is the core problem of the code base)

lucideer 6y ago

This is such a ridiculous comment I don't know where to start. Are you actually proposing that being a fully experienced & knowledgeable software engineer should be a base requirement for all academic research (in any field)? If you, working as a software engineer, were told tomorrow by your manager that you needed to perform heart surgery, and that that now fell under your responsibilities in your current role, would your argument be the same? The private sector's typical response to the problems in the article would be to hire qualified software engineers to assist researchers. Funding dictates this is impossible, so they make do.

moron4hire 6y ago
No, your analogy is definitely the most ridiculous thing here.
pbourke 6y ago
> Funding dictates this is impossible, so they make do. Put another way: software quality is not valued in academia. Let’s say the code in question was in great shape. Would it have mattered at all in the trajectory of anyone’s career? No. This is probably the one academic code base in a million that has received any negative reputational hit due to its quality.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > software quality is not valued in academia. And in general, it shouldn't. Code written by scientists is almost always throwaway prototypes. So it absolutely doesn't matter how decoupled, or easy to extend it is. The only aspect of quality that matters here is the simplicity, in the sense "it obviously has no bugs" (and related practices like testing). This is something that could be taught, but I think it should be also addressed from the other end of the spectrum - more pressure put on verification and reproducibility of results.
  - mcv 6y ago
    It doesn't have to be decoupled or easy to extend, but it should be readable enough to ensure it does what it's supposed to, and well-tested enough to verify it does what it's supposed to.
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      I think Blaise Pascal's (or whoever really said it) remark is apposite here: If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
silveraxe93 6y ago
Where in my comment did you see me proposing that "being a fully experienced & knowledgeable software engineer should be a base requirement for all academic research (in any field)" Go back and re-read it please. I'm saying you need to be capable of using the tools for your job. If I was working as a software engineer, I'd not be asked to perform heart surgery. A more realistic example would be a software engineer being tasked to develop software in the medical industry, where I would expect them to understand the subject matter enough to ascertain their software is not crap.
- lucideer 6y ago
  Sorry but there's a pretty big gap between understanding the domain for which your software is intended, and being qualified to work as a professional in that domain. The latter is what you're asking of academics.
  - silveraxe93 6y ago
    I guess we are in agreement then ;) If academics are writing predictive modelling software, I ask that they are qualified to do so.
    - lucideer 6y ago
      > Where in my comment did you see me proposing that "being a fully experienced & knowledgeable software engineer should be a base requirement for all academic research (in any field)" > I ask that they are qualified to do so. You need to make up your mind on this one. Are you asking this or aren't you?
      - silveraxe93 6y ago
        Being -- capable of writing quality software -- should be a base requirement for -- Anyone developing software used for academic research -- in any field -- in which the conclusions are based upon the correctness of this software. Not all academic research depends on writing software.
mcv 6y ago
> "The private sector's typical response to the problems in the article would be to hire qualified software engineers to assist researchers. Funding dictates this is impossible, so they make do." But that is a bizarre conclusion. Is it really cheaper to let scientists focus on something they know nothing about, than to hire an expert to do it? Do you cut costs by letting scientists mop the floor, clean the toilet and guard the entrance?
- lucideer 6y ago
  > Is it really cheaper to let scientists focus on something they know nothing about, than to hire an expert to do it? Do you cut costs by letting scientists mop the floor, clean the toilet and guard the entrance? Believe it or not, mean software engineer salaries are marginally higher than those of janitors and door security.
  - mcv 6y ago
    But easily worth it if it saves the scientist a lot of time and makes the implementation of their model more accurate and reliable.
web007 6y ago
If you write software for your research then yes. Just as I would expect you to have a solid basis in statistics, you need more than a 101-level competency in programming / software engineering if that's what you use to do your job. Same goes no matter what tools you're using, you need something beyond basic competence or advice from someone who does. Nothing that I do day-to-day is remotely like surgery or in any way healthcare related, so that's a stupid straw man. Asking the same question of the academic _studying healthcare_ would be more apropos, but equally stupid and nonsensical.
thu2111 6y ago
There's plenty of funding in academia. Come on. It's a huge segment of society, governments spend billions on it. They don't hire software engineers to write their models because they know they can get published without that and they'd rather hire more students into their department and publish more papers. For academia to claim they can't afford to produce programs that work is absurd and damning - why should anyone believe anything in a scientific paper if this attitude is so widespread? Some people here are arguing it's ridiculous to expect academics to produce work that's correct, even putting assumptions to one side. All it takes to fix this is multi-disciplinary teams. Of the type found in almost any industry but apparently, not academia. Why is this idea so strongly rejected by academia when it's just common sense everywhere else?

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Well, even if, the tool doesn't come with a warning. Real-life tools come with them. (The question is, what kind of warning would be useful on a programming language? C/C++ perhaps should come with a booklet about pointers, but other than that, I can't think of any but one: "WARNING: this is a tool for extreme clarification of thought; if you're confused about your subject matter, your project will produce wrong results. As you write code, take steps to verify your understanding of your problem domain.") More importantly, our industry is spending a lot of time and marketing money on convincing that everyone can code, that it's just a matter of picking up a JavaScript tutorial and pressing F12 in the browser, and you too are now a software developer. These two views are in direct opposition to each other.

rainforest 6y ago

Good software development is missing from most academic promotion tracks. "Research Software Engineers" are a recently new thing, which is an admission that academics are not very good at software engineering and supports the notion that they can't reasonably be expected to be experts in two disciplines. There is a large amount of software being written by non-software engineers (most of it is Excel) so I think it's probably constructive to say that the solution lies elsewhere other than expecting academics to become software engineers. If that sort of requirement is in place it would be hard to argue against software engineering being a chartered engineering discipline with liabilities and qualifications which would be very disruptive to a lot of the industry. It is worth remembering that academic code sharing is rare in and of itself. This reaction is likely to cause other academics to shy away from publishing their code. Perhaps giving them an opportunity to make their mistakes public so that more skilled engineers could help before the credibility of their results is used to justify drastic government policies would be better?

zozbot234 6y ago

Some tools are inherently safer than others. The whole difference between C++ and Rust is that it's a bit harder to shoot yourself in the foot while using Rust, the way you can with C++. It's not that you can't do it, but generally it involves purposely bypassing its safety mechanisms. You're still supposed to know what you're doing, but you know where you need to pay attention.

ookdatnog 6y ago

> If you're not qualified to use a tool correctly it's not the manufacturer's fault, it's yours. It certainly _can_ be the manufacturer's fault, if the manufacturer's salespeople lied to you about the learning required to master the tool. I think the point of the article is that collectively, as a community of experts, we have been misguiding non-experts into thinking that C++ is a good tool for their job. A non-expert cannot make an informed decision on which tool to use, they _have_ to rely on advice from experts to pick their first tool, so if they feel like we're recommending C++ (and I agree with the author that this is not a good tool for non-experts), then that's, in a sense, on us. (That being said I did not inspect the code, so I don't know if the author's implication is right that C++ is the core problem of the code base)