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It's not so much that Python is gibberish but that is written, as far as I know, predominantly by engineers, who aren't really experts in statistics, or experts
by lottin 6y ago
It's not so much that Python is gibberish but that is written, as far as I know, predominantly by engineers, who aren't really experts in statistics, or experts in science for that matter. A scientist will tend to trust more code written by another scientist than code written by an engineer. At least, I would.
- milesvp 6y agoI find this statement interesting. Historically scientists have a reputation for writing relatively poor code. Code that runs really slowly due to things like unintended nested loops, or striding values (x,y vs y,x). And code that doesn't handle non-happy path cases very well. Are you saying that you trust the code more because the domain knowledge make it more likely to get the right answer then? Has general knowledge increased such that scientists' code isn't as painful as it was 20 years ago?
- lottin 6y agoYeah, exactly, even though it might be terribly inefficient, I still trust scientific code more when it's written by scientists than when it's written by non-scientists, in terms of getting the right answer.