> Sure, and that rationale works OK when your code operates in a limited, specialized domain. There are a lot of domains which do have a deep impact on society

> Sure, and that rationale works OK when your code operates in a limited, specialized domain. There are a lot of domains which do have a deep impact on society but are completely underfunded. For example research on ecology and declining insect populations. Or research on education. And domains like epidemiology, climate change research, cancer research or such are not known to earn better salaries to scientists as on average. Most scientists earn a pity. > But if you're modeling climate change or infectious diseases, and you expect your work to affect millions of human lives and trillions of dollars in spending, then you owe us a full accounting of it. What one can expect from scientists, in whatever subject they work, is honesty, integrity, a full account of their findings. What you can't expect is that they just turn into expert software engineers or make their working code beautiful. You can't expect them to work for free. What the academic system demands from them is that they work on their next paper instead, so if you want pretty code, you need at least in part to change the system.