As a scientist I've written massive amounts of shitty code that turned out to be reproducible by lucky accident. Part of the problem are the tools: depending on

As a scientist I've written massive amounts of shitty code that turned out to be reproducible by lucky accident. Part of the problem are the tools: depending on the field, scientists either use Matlab, C++, Fortran or some other framework that needs to die. They base their code on other ancient code that runs for unknown reasons, and use packages written by other scientists with the same problems. As someone who's transitioning into industry, I can tell you that scientists will never adopt software engineering principles to any significant extent. It takes too much time to do things like write tests and thorough documentation, learn Git, etc., and software engineering just isn't interesting to most of them. So the only alternative I see is changing the tools to stuff that's still easy to hack around with but where it's harder to mess up (or it's more obvious when you do so). That doesn't leave a ton of options (that I can see). Some I can think of are: - Make your code look more like math and less like mathlib.linalg.dot(x1, x2).reshape(a, b).mean().euclidean_distance((x3, x4)) + (other long expression) or whatever: Use a language like Julia - Your language/environment gets angry when you write massive hairballs, loads of nested for-loops and variables that keep getting changed: Use a language like Rust, and/or write more modular code with a functional-leaning language like Rust or Julia. - You're forced to make your code semi-understandable to you and others more than an hour after writing it: Forcing people to write documentation isn't gonna work (a lot). Forcing sensible variable names is slightly more realistic. More likely, you need some combination of the above two things that just make your code more legible. How do you make that happen? No idea.